We are just over two weeks removed from Kentucky cutting down the nets in New Orleans, and already the extremely large number of high-profile transfers has become the top theme of college basketball’s offseason.
Bo Ryan’s Transfer Ban List For Jarrod Uthoff Is Abnormally Large
Coaches restricting players from transferring to a handful of schools isn’t unheard of in college basketball, but Bo Ryan’s transfer ban list for freshman Jarrod Uthoff is abnormally lengthy.
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While the proverbial dust is still a ways away from settling, it appears that when all is said and done each Division-I team will be losing an average of somewhere around 1.5 players to transfer.
With that being the case, the decision by Wisconsin's Jarrod Uthoff to take his game to another campus isn't worthy of national headlines on its own. The story is where his soon-to-be former head coach Bo Ryan says he can't go...which is a lot of places.
Uthoff, the state of Iowa’s Mr. Basketball for 2011, informed the Badger coaching staff last week of his intent to transfer. Shortly thereafter he was told that his new destination could not be a Big Ten school...then it was Iowa State and Marquette...and then it was the entire ACC.
All in all, Ryan has banned Uthoff from transferring to a total of 25 schools.
“You have a better guess than I do,” Uthoff said when asked about the reason behind Ryan’s large restricted list. “I’m not really sure.”
What Ryan is doing is completely within NCAA rules, but there’s a reason you hardly ever see coaches come up with a restricted transfer list that’s more than a handful of schools long. That reason is that it’s ridiculously petty and incredibly unfair to the player affected.
Who knew the Big Ten/ACC Challenge (or the vaunted Wisconsin/Iowa State rivalry) meant so much to Bo Ryan?
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