Purdue added Johnny Hill yesterday to fill an urgent, dare we say desperate, need on what can be a very good Boilermaker team next season.
It marked the third consecutive off-season in which Matt Painter has culled reinforcements from the fifth-year transfer recruiting market.
It could also be the last time.
The rule is going to change. Of that much, a lot of people are certain.
Athletes don't have a lot of ease of movement in college sports nowadays and should have more leverage than they do, and taking away the fifth-year loophole would take away even more freedom.
That shouldn't happen.
But there's no question that this one-year market has created a less-than-ideal dynamic for the game, being used as a sort of de facto earned free agency instead of the academic opportunity as it's supposed to be.
What's the solution?
This: Allow a graduated player to transfer for his final season of eligibility, but on an extended sixth-year basis that would allow him to move, but require him to sit out a year before competing for that one final year.
Is that in the student-athlete's best interests? Maybe not ideal, but for those serious about graduate school, this would provide scholarship coverage for two years instead of one, thus allowing for more substantive grad-school access on a school's dime while also ridding the recruiting market of schools that want a kid when there's no investment if a scholarship is open anyway, but may not really <i>want</i> a kid, if that makes sense.
So many problems would be curbed if schools would just only recruit players they really, honestly, genuinely want and that is not happening all the time, especially during the spring window in which fifth-year players come available, at the heart of just-fill-the-damn-roster season.
It's a good thing for athletes to be able to move, and it's incentive to graduate, and that's supposed to be the goal of this entire enterprise, right?
It does suck for the Texas-Arlingtons of the world who lose good players they've put time into, but maybe that gets curbed significantly if a sit-out model is implemented, because fewer players will move.
To date, this has mostly been a basketball thing, but look out, football, because winter is coming, and it's going to be a long one.
Michigan alone has added fifth-year transfers this season.
Considering the sheer volume of players in football who redshirt and the fact that new core academic requirements are being raised, creating a new pool of "partial" qualifiers*, this has real potential for chaos if it takes hold. And for every Russell Wilson, there's going to be a dozen guys who uproot themselves just to stand on the sideline for a year and leave NCAA sports with a sour taste in their mouths in a lot of cases. Football is not a step-right-in sort of sport the way basketball is; the fifth-year craze hitting that sport may not go well.
(NCAA eligibility standards will soon move from 2.0 core GPA requirement to a 2.3, with players that fall between the two only being eligible to practice, which will amount to a redshirt.)
To date, though, this has mostly been about basketball, and Purdue's been impacted as much as anyone, if not more.
It should be noted that Johnny Hill is the first fifth-year transfer Purdue has landed without some sort of circumstance at play.
Purdue's first two fifth-year signees - Errick Peck and Sterling Carter - couldn't stay where they were. Its third, Jon Octeus, couldn't go where he initially wanted.
Hill left Arlington for a chance to play in the NCAA Tournament, a chance he'll very likely get with the Boilermakers in 2016.
Good for Hill. Good for Purdue. Not-so-good for Arlington, whose coaching staff declined an interview request about the guard they put two years of effort into and got 21 games out of.
It goes both ways, though. This is elevator goes down, too.
Purdue wanted Sandi Marcius back. But it had A.J. Hammons and Marcius' people thought the player was better served to set himself up for a pro career overseas by being a starter on a losing DePaul team instead of remaining at Purdue (which as it turned out wasn't any better that following season).
Purdue didn't want John Hart back, a situation that illustrated some additional benefit to fifth-year movement options. Too many players are being simply cut in college basketball, an issue that lies as much on coaches reaching for players they don't really want as much as anything.
The fifth-year loophole might buy a run-off candidate time, because a scholarship-needy coach might be best served to wait for a kid to graduate. In context, that's a win-win. You'll recall that Purdue basically told that player he could graduate then move on; think every program out there would have done the same?
The immediately eligible fifth-year model is of some soft-landing value in situations like Hart's, or situations like Notre Dame football, where fifth-year seniors ridiculously have to be "invited back" to complete the terms of their eligibility.
But though it's been good for schools like Purdue and Wisconsin football, this springtime free agency of one-year rentals isn't good for college sports and it won't be an issue much longer.
The rule is going to change.
The way to change it - the one way to preserve the good while curbing the bad - is to make the one-year transfer a two-year transfer, requiring some flexibility from the historically rigid monolith that is the NCAA.
