Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan’s experience with transfers is about as extensive as his experience in beet farming. So, he says, he consulted other coaches about how to handle the process when redshirt freshman forward Jarrod Uthoff recently expressed his intention to leave the program.
Which leads one to wonder: None of those coaches have heard of Twitter?
Bo Ryan has placed significant restrictions on forward Jarrod Uthoff's transfer in the effort to get a full explanation of why he is leaving. (AP photo)In a conversation Thursday with Sporting News, Ryan explained his decision to restrict Uthoff from transferring to other Big Ten schools -- as well as Marquette, Florida, Iowa State and the entire Atlantic Coast Conference -- was primarily a device to coerce Uthoff into the university’s internal appeals process so he'd have to explain his decision to leave the Badgers.
Ryan made it clear that he was bothered Uthoff was leaving the program without so much as a face-to-face meeting, instead declaring his intent in a telephone call when Ryan was taking a postseason vacation with his wife.
Uthoff, a 6-8 forward from Iowa who redshirted last season, had more than a week to speak with Ryan personally following the Badgers’ loss to Syracuse in the NCAA Sweet 16. If he’d waited a few days until Ryan returned from California -- Ryan even offered to cut his trip short to meet with Uthoff -- there were another three weeks or so before Wisconsin’s semester ended.
But, no. Uthoff’s transfer request stood as the rough equivalent of the dude who broke up with Carrie Bradshaw via post-it note on “Sex and the City.”
“Nobody’s trying to hurt anybody. If the kid doesn’t want to talk to you about a transfer, just do us a favor and go tell the administrator,” Ryan said Thursday. “All we were saying is, 'If you want to go to one of these schools, come in and talk.' He doesn’t have to talk to me, but you can talk to a representative of our school.”
Ryan said on ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike program Thursday that he owed it to his employers and the people who support the university, “If somebody wants to transfer, can I have a little bit better idea of why?”
Transfer restrictions are not rare in college athletics. The Big East has a rule that essentially prevents any recruit who signs a letter of intent with a member school from receiving a scholarship from another league member. With the way that league is expanding, that covers almost half of Division I. And Uthoff's ability to transfer hasn't exactly been crippled; he already has a recruiting visit scheduled to Creighton in the next few days.
In the world of Twitter, however, where a widely published opinion is only 140 characters and one keystroke away, such nuance seems obsolete. There were scores of condemnations for Ryan within hours of the initial report from Iowa-based preps site Metro Sports, which quoted Uthoff as saying, “I didn’t see it coming,” when he received an e-mail from Wisconsin regarding the restrictions.
Ryan, though, would have recognized the impending conflagration that was about to consume him if he’d communicated with people who remembered what occurred not even six months ago with Saint Joseph’s, coach Phil Martelli and aspiring transfer Todd O’Brien.
In the St. Joe’s case, the method, mechanism and intent of the school's decision not to endorse O’Brien’s desire to compete as a graduate transfer at Alabama-Birmingham were buried in an avalanche of media criticism that depicted Martelli as cruel and vindictive.
Martelli has been the Hawks' coach for 17 years. He was in charge of the last team to finish a college basketball regular season undefeated, in 2004, and won just about every national coach of the year award that spring. He is extremely active in the Coaches vs. Cancer program. When you Google him now, however, one of the three top items returned bears this headline from an ESPN.com column: “What on Earth is Phil Martelli doing?”
Ryan has been coach at Wisconsin since 2001 and, during that time, has run perhaps the most admirable program in Division I basketball. Every one of his teams has reached the NCAA Tournament with 10-of-11 clubs winning at least one game in the event. His Badgers have won three Big Ten championships. There have been 39 academic All-Big Ten selections among his players. The Badgers have excelled while fielding only a handful of elite recruits along the way. And, through all of that, essentially only one player prior this year decided to transfer to another school -- and none had it decided for him, which is rarer still.
How many schools aside from Wisconsin could have produced a story such as Rob Wilson, a shooting guard who struggled for nearly four full seasons to find a spot in the Badgers’ rotation -- and this March helped the team win an important Big Ten Tournament quarterfinal game against Indiana with a 30-point explosion? A whole lot of coaches would have -- politely or harshly -- told Wilson he needed to find another school after averaging just 3.1 points as a sophomore. He will graduate from Wisconsin next month, the first in his family to earn a degree.
Ryan told Sporting News merely cutting loose Uthoff with a blanket release “would have been the easy thing to do. I’m not looking for easy. There was no mistreatment.” He said it's conceivable the school could decide to lift the transfer restrictions entirely.
Ryan now recognizes this case is being seized upon by critics of rules restricting NCAA athlete transfers, and it's being used to advance the cause of greater freedom for those young men and women.
There is much to be said for that principle, but turning good people into villains probably won’t advance it, and certainly does not flatter it.
The advantage Ryan has over Martelli at this point is his willingness and/or ability to discuss the reason he chose this particular course. Ryan says Uthoff has some responsibility “to your teammates, to your school, to the people who in good faith recruited him.” All Ryan seeks is an explanation. It does not seem much to ask.
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