New NCAA Ruling on Transfers' Immediate Eligibility Doesn't Actually Solve Anything

Apart from all its other ongoing scandals, the NCAA has been under fire in recent months for it's seemingly arbitrary system of handling transfer eligibility among it's high-profile athletes, particularly in regards to football.

They responded by creating a new ruling to make it more difficult for athletes to receive immediate eligibility, but this determination unfortunately does nothing to solve the real problems at hand.

The original guideline stated that athletes had to provide “documented mitigating circumstances outside of the student-athlete’s control and directly impacts the health, safety or well-being of the student-athlete" in order to play immediately at a transfer destination.

Now, they've tossed in "extenuating" and "extraordinary" in front of "mitigating circumstances." It's a thinly veiled attempt to give themselves an out when they start issuing fewer waivers without actually providing solid reasoning.

This changes nothing. The NCAA, which has had trouble keeping a precedent in seemingly similar transfer cases, just wants deniability as it seemingly attempts to ward off what would essentially be amateur free agency. At the end of the day, there's every reason to believe that top-tier athletes like Justin Fields will continue to get what they desire because it's in the best interest of corporate sponsors and TV partners, while some players with equally or exceedingly legitimate grievances could be left out in the cold to fend for themselves.

Now, athletes will feel the need to document as much as they possibly can of their interactions with coaches and staff in order to state the best possible "extenuating and extraordinary case." And all of that information will be at risk of getting leaked to the public-- unintentionally or otherwise.

The last thing that the college sports world needs is more scandal and more controversy, but we might be headed precisely there with the new ruling.

The change does nothing to solve the problem of the massive influx of transfer requests. If anything, it's created more problems that will soon need to be dealt with.

This doesn't make the process easier for the athletes, and it sure doesn't make the process look any cleaner on the part of the NCAA. Bad form all around.