High Point might hire Tubby Smith as it reportedly blocks a star player’s transfer

The next stop on Tubby Smith’s journey across the college basketball coaching world appears to be High Point, ESPN’s Jeff Goodman reported Sunday:

It’s a homecoming for Smith, a former player and member of High Point’s class of 1973. The Panthers have generally been pretty bad in their 19 seasons as a Division I program. They’ve never made an NCAA tournament, and they’ve finished below .500 in 10 seasons. They haven’t usually been a Big South competitor, though they got at least a share of the league’s regular-season title in both 2015 and 2016. They’ve been lousy the past two years, though, going just worse than .500 both times, so they parted ways with coach Scott Cherry.

This seems like a good fit. Memphis just fired Smith after two decent but all-in-all mediocre seasons (combined record: 40-26, with no NCAA tournament bids). Smith wasn’t going to be in serious consideration for power conference jobs, in all likelihood, and didn’t do well enough in the next-closest thing in the AAC. He gets to go to his alma mater, where he’ll probably increase the national visibility of the program and win some games. Smith’s best known for his decade in charge at Kentucky, which ended in 2007. But he’s since had some success at Minnesota and one tournament team at Texas Tech. He’s 66 and clearly on the back nine of his coaching career, but he’s not too old to thrive at a place like High Point.

Andre Fox is not paid a wage to play college basketball. Just like every other time a college athletic program tries to tell a player he can’t transfer (whether that’s in general, or to some school in particular), it’s wrong. High Point should do the right thing and let Fox go, and he should bring some nice scoring touch to whichever school wants him and he chooses.

It’s not clear if Smith has anything to do with this decision. He’s not officially in the job yet. But if High Point doesn’t do the right thing on its own and let Fox transfer to any school that wants him, the Panthers should be shamed until they stop trying to dictate where a purported amateur gets to learn and play.

NCAA committee members are considering doing away with the rule that gives schools the discretion to allow other programs to recruit players for transfers or not. That’d be a great start, but there’s no good reason for schools to act this way now.