BOWLING GREEN — In the weeks and months leading up to his first season as a head coach, Scot Loeffler undertook what often felt like a part-time job.
In addition to the Bowling Green coach’s expected duties — overhauling nearly everything about the program, installing a new offense, and recruiting — Loeffler dedicated tremendous amounts of time to securing eligibility for just one of his players.
Transfer Matt McDonald followed Loeffler from Boston College to Bowling Green, but unlike the coach, the quarterback’s bid to participate during the first season at BG was fraught with paperwork and NCAA red tape.
Acquiring a waiver to grant immediate eligibility, given by the NCAA to several high-profile quarterbacks earlier in 2019, was nothing less than exhaustive in Bowling Green’s case.
“I was talking to everybody,” Loeffler recalled. “I’m talking to our compliance people, I’m talking to the NCAA, I’m talking to Boston College, they’re talking to the NCAA, I’m talking to Matt, and these take hours.
“It was just this whole huge deal that went on for months. I mean, pretty much from Memorial Day until the second week of the season, this was going on.”
A day before the Falcons were scheduled to play Sept. 7 at Kansas State, they received word as they boarded their plane that McDonald’s case had been denied by the NCAA on its final appeal — and all of their efforts had been for naught.
During training camp, McDonald won the starting job at quarterback, but could not play immediately like a number of quarterbacks who had transferred during the same offseason.
Loeffer said at the time that there were “tremendous inconsistencies” with waiver rulings, but his primary issue with the current transfer system is that players are forced to burn a year of eligibility that is never returned to them.
“He completely loses that year,” Loeffler said of McDonald. “You sit out for transferring, and then you never get it back.”
Big changes, however, could be on the horizon for players in McDonald’s shoes in future seasons.
The NCAA is studying a proposal that would allow players in good academic standing to transfer once without penalty. Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher is the working chair of the group studying the proposal, for which the Big Ten and the Atlantic Coast Conference already have voiced support.
“The current system is unsustainable,” Steinbrecher said in a press release on Tuesday. “Working group members believe it’s time to bring our transfer rules more in line with today’s college landscape.”
After going through the waiver process with McDonald, Loeffler came to the conclusion that it’s unfair to punish players for transferring. His idea: Returning a year of eligibility upon graduation to players who burned a year while transferring.
“If he has to sit out for a year, he should have a chance to get that year back,” Loeffler said. “Once he graduates, he should get that year of eligibility back, in my opinion.”
Many coaches view the penalty-free transfer as an inevitability, and for Loeffler, changes to the waiver process are certainly welcome following a choatic last offseason.
“The consistency [with rulings] just wasn’t there,” Loeffler said. “I think pretty much everybody realized that there had to be a better way to do this.”
First Published February 20, 2020, 7:41 p.m.
