Greg Sankey calls for one-time transfer rule, national standards in NIL

Greg Sankey will be in Washington D.C. at President Donald Trump’s roundtable at the White House on March 6. First, however, the SEC commissioner was in attendance for the top 25 matchup in the SEC between Texas and Georgia women’s basketball on Thursday night.

Sankey joined the broadcast team where he discussed several topics, among those including the NCAA transfer portal and NIL. He would call for national eligibility standards, urging Congress to focus on specific issues impacting eligibility and managing transfers as to “not diminish the educational continuity” of college athletics.

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“My advocacy would be, hey, we should be back to some type of one-time transfer exception,” Sankey said during the second quarter. “But we have to support educational continuity if we truly believe that academics is the heart of what we do. And I’m a true believer in that.

“Yeah, we should be competitive. We should allow people to make decisions. … This notion that we have 26, 27, 28-year-olds now playing against 19 and 20 year olds. That means there’s fewer opportunities to move from high school into college athletics. That’s not who we’ve been. That’s not who we should be. That’s where we get back to national standards, to the extent conferences need to manage that themselves. I think we’re ready to do that at the presidential level, that the NCAA can do that with kind of some new thinking and new rationale.”

A one-time transfer exception would be throwing a wrench into how teams currently build their rosters. It’s not uncommon to see players on their third or even fourth school in four or five seasons who become instant-impact performers for their squads.

Sankey’s stance on eligibility has remained firm, however, which is evident in the case of Alabama‘s Charles Bediako. The SEC commissioner asked the court to uphold the NCAA’s decision to deny him eligibility after leaving school in 2023 and spending the last three years in the NBA’s G League.

Bediako’s case is just one of many, however. Over the last year, several players have come out suing the NCAA for extra eligibility. Some have been granted, such as for Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss, but it’s been on a case-by-case basis.

Enacting national standards would provide clear rules and expectations for the NCAA and its conferences moving forward. It evens the playing field for everyone across the board.

“The young people on the court, when we meet with them, they ask one thing: ‘I want to know when I line up for tip-off, that the people in the other uniform are held to the same standards and the same set of policies that I’m held to,'” Sankey said.

“I think that’s the most common sense way to describe what needs to happen nationally.”