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5 Things Most Don’t Understand About Tez Walker-NCAA Debacle
By David Glenn
There has been extensive national and local media coverage of the bizarre NCAA ineligibility case of UNC wide receiver Devontez “Tez” Walker, including some great work here, here and here at Chapelboro.com, but many college sports fans and NCAA critics still overlook or fail to understand some of the foundational elements of Walker’s unusual case.
With that in mind, here are five things most folks still don’t comprehend about this Walker-UNC debacle, courtesy of someone who has had both (1) the displeasure of trying to understand the NCAA’s rules and inner workings for the last 37 years, and (2) thanks in part to a law degree and long-time law practice, the perhaps undesirable reputation of being an expert on such things.
- The rules impacting Walker were imposed in January 2023 after votes by, and significant debate amongst, the NCAA member institutions themselves, including UNC.
Oddly, one of the most basic and most consistent realities about criticism of the NCAA is that many critics don’t really understand whom they’re criticizing or where they’re placing blame.
NCAA rules are not adopted covertly by a mysterious governing body. They’re made by actual people, all representing actual schools/conferences that choose to be members of the NCAA, a voluntary association.
In the Walker case, for example, both your favorite school (perhaps UNC) and your most hated school (perhaps someone secretly happy to see Walker, a prominent NFL prospect, unavailable for star quarterback Drake Maye this season) had opportunities, directly and indirectly, to discuss and debate how multi-time transfers were going to be handled under new NCAA rules.
Ultimately, after that process, the NCAA in mid-January announced severe restrictions on the immediate eligibility of multi-time undergraduate transfers. The new legislation specified that immediate-eligibility waivers would be granted only in strictly defined categories (mental-health issues was the exception Walker sought) and only if various information/documentation, as well as the “chronology of events,” supported one of the narrowly defined waivers.
You may not like those rules, or how they’re applied in this particular case. Just try to remember that, for example, UNC and every other Division I school participated in the process that created these rules. It has become shocking how many fans, in particular, forget this very basic starting point to these sorts of discussions.
- If a lawsuit is filed on Walker’s behalf, a judge taking the case would NOT be permitted to simply impose his/her personal view of “fairness.”
This is often False Assumption #2 among members of the general public in these cases. If we could just get this in front of a judge, they suggest, he or she would see the fundamental unfairness here, as these new eligibility rules are applied specifically to the Walker case.
While there’s a very good chance a judge would indeed see the ridiculous nature of the result here, as so many others do, that definitely would not be the essence of the judge’s duty were this case to reach his or her courtroom.
Instead, as is required in many other contexts and many other areas of the law, the judge would give great deference to the organization involved, its rules-making process and especially the rules themselves. The judge would not simply ask whether the result was “fair,” or whether the judge would have created different rules, or even whether the judge, under the existing NCAA rules, would have reached a different conclusion in Walker’s case.
In the end, only if the judge deemed that the NCAA had clearly failed to follow its own rules (that’s not the case simply because there are gray areas), or had adopted “arbitrary and capricious” rules (unlikely, as that’s an extremely hard-to-reach standard of review) or had somehow violated Walker’s legal rights would the judge ultimately require the NCAA to let Walker play this season.
Again, the starting point in such cases is one of judicial deference, and only the most extreme, clear-cut, obvious, mismanaged cases typically lead judges to overrule the NCAA’s judgments.
- If UNC, or anyone considered a representative of UNC athletics, provided an attorney to Walker at no charge or even at a reduced rate, the NCAA could interpret that act as an “impermissible benefit,” in violation of other NCAA rules.
While there are many, many examples of individuals and organizations successfully suing the NCAA, including rare cases (some wins, some losses) involving player-eligibility issues, there are not nearly as many examples of an NCAA member school serving as the plaintiff.
If Walker (or his family on his behalf) wanted to pursue a legal challenge to the NCAA in this case, he certainly could do so. However, some potential scenarios could create a new problem (i.e., NCAA rules prohibit “impermissible benefits” to Walker and his family) while trying to solve an existing one, so anyone considered a representative of UNC athletics likely will be deterred from entering this fray, unless Walker and/or his family are able and willing to pay fair market value for the attorney’s services.
An attorney representing Walker may have at least one good-faith option for a claim. While “basic unfairness,” by itself, does not constitute a valid basis for a legal challenge, the concept of reliance can. Walker committed to, signed with and enrolled at UNC two days before the rule change impacting multi-time transfers, at least arguably relying on the routine granting of waivers that had been in play prior to the new rules, which the NCAA announced Jan. 11.
- Many of the transfer cases brought up by fans — and even some UNC officials — are different than the Walker case in important ways and thus are completely irrelevant to the NCAA’s decision-making process in the Walker case.
The main distinction here is the difference between a graduate transfer (someone who already has a college diploma) and an undergraduate transfer, such as Walker. The new NCAA legislation makes crystal-clear that the rules applying to undergraduates who transfer multiple times do not apply to graduate transfers.
Many college football fans brought up the fast-moving case of former UNC cornerback Storm Duck, who entered the transfer portal and left the Tar Heels last December, enrolled at Penn State for the spring 2023 semester, then re-entered the transfer portal in April and committed to Louisville later that month. After all of that, he’s already playing for the Cardinals, but his immediate eligibility (at Penn State, Louisville or anywhere else) stems entirely from the fact that he’s a graduate transfer, thanks to his UNC diploma.
Similarly, when UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham referenced — without using names — the case of four-schools-in-six-years Rice quarterback JT Daniels (plus Colorado’s 50-plus transfers under new coach Deion Sanders) in his comments on social media, the UNC athletic director was simply making a logical, big-picture argument in the court of public opinion.
Cunningham knows that same argument does not carry even an ounce of weight with the NCAA regarding the Walker case. Why not? Because Daniels has been a graduate transfer ever since he received a diploma at Georgia, the second of his four collegiate stops. He used his one-time transfer exception to move from Southern Cal to UGa, then took advantage of the true freedom permitted for graduate transfers as he jumped to West Virginia (2022) and now Rice, where he already has become a star for the Owls this season.
- There is significant evidence that Walker’s transfer to UNC was motivated primarily by coaching changes at Kent State, his previous school, and NCAA rules clearly do NOT allow that as the underlying basis for immediate eligibility with multi-time undergraduate transfers.
It’s been both surprising and disappointing that this angle has been either completely excluded or barely mentioned in most media coverage of the Walker case, because it could be a significant part of the NCAA’s bottom line and/or point of view.
“Significant evidence,” of course, can mean pieces of a larger puzzle. There’s also other “significant evidence” that mental health concerns were central to Walker’s UNC decision.
The NCAA’s decision-makers are aware that Walker made public comments indicating that Kent State’s coaching change had inspired his entry into the transfer portal last December. After a five-year record of 24-31 with the Golden Flashes, head coach Sean Lewis resigned Dec. 8 to become Sanders’ offensive coordinator with the Buffaloes.
One day later, Walker entered the transfer portal. That does not preclude the mental-health angle, of course, but it certainly suggests the importance of the coaching change in Walker’s most recent transfer decision.
Similarly, the NCAA’s decision-makers are aware that Walker took an official visit to Rutgers (located in New Jersey) last December, when he also stated publicly that he might have visited some combination of Penn State, Pittsburgh and Tennessee, too, if the NCAA recruiting calendar hadn’t been entering a mid-December “dead period.” Walker also made a mid-December visit to UNC, of course, before quickly committing to the Tar Heels.
It’s not difficult to contemplate some very fair and reasonable questions for Walker from the NCAA decision-makers, who must decide whether his case is really more of a traditional undergraduate transfer (which requires a sit-out year) or a case that truly qualifies under the new rules’ mental-health waiver.
If this is mainly a mental-health case, why didn’t Walker try to leave Kent State (about 500 miles from his Charlotte home) to get closer to home until after his coach departed? If this is really a case about the true necessity of being closer to home, why did Walker visit Rutgers (about 600 miles from Charlotte) and consider additional visits to schools in faraway Pennsylvania?
Perhaps there are answers to those questions the NCAA would deem acceptable, rather than disqualifying, in this context. Perhaps not.
Because of privacy issues, Walker doesn’t have to answer those questions publicly, nor should he unless he’s inclined to do so. Given his unusual case, though, he likely has had to offer answers and lots of details — on both his Kent State-UNC transfer and his earlier NC Central-Kent State transfer — to the NCAA, and some of those responses may have been viewed skeptically, given his previous comments in the above-referenced media reports.
(featured image via UNC Athletic Communications)
David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.
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Isn’t the fact that the rule change occurred after Walker transferred to UNC germane? The rule change should govern future transfers, not past transfers.
Student-athlete was a term coined by the NCAA to try and obscure the fact that the athletes are unpaid employees. I don’t dispute what you state in your article. However, my opinion will always be that students should be able to transfer as much as they want. And maximize their earning potential as much as any other student.
There are a lot of smart people in the room granted. Sometimes like water we take the path of least resistance to our detriment. Did Walker relying on UNC take the wrong road to attack the transfer regulations in the manner they did?
The Supreme Court’s decision in NCAA v. Alston (particularly Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s blistering concurrence), which has exposed the NCAA’s regulatory structure to antitrust scrutiny. Antitrust rules do apply to labor market rules in collegiate athletics is the bold print to remember.
UNC offered Walker the opportunity to improve his earning potential in the near and far term. BY not allowing players to transfer for economic reasons could be considered a heavy-handed restraint on trade. The Court’s references to the fact that the NCAA’s multimarket balancing went unchallenged could suggest that it has reservations about such balancing.
Maybe it is time for student athletes to accept Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s invitation to challenge the remaining rules.
Something you conveniently leave out is that this was retroactively implemented. Under the rules as they were at the time of transfer he would have been eligible with a waiver. The new rules passed after his transfer made the waiver more difficult to obtain. That’s where the injustice lies.
Good article but it ignores the due process issue. The NCAA eliminated the waiver and returned to the basic rule two days after he transferred. That was the key to getting in front of a judge. He rightly and timely relied on the waiver. The fact that the rules and timing of waiver eliminations are made by rival schools is precisely why the due process issue was a winner. Even the mental health exception is too vague and arbitrary to stand any legal scrutiny. Whi gets to decide the legitimacy or sufficiency of somebody else’s mental health issue? Especially if the standard is set by a rival school? The reason UNC lost is because in truth Walker wasn’t transferring for mental health issues and that’s exactly why UNC should’ve never played the NCAA game and gone straight to court. They could and should have won there.