NCAA Basketball - why aren't coaches & players treated the same when "transferring"?

NCAA coaches & players have totally different rules, and something isn't right about that. Washington St. men's basketball coach Tony Bennett is taking the open head coaching spot at the University of Virginia (read about it at http://tiny.cc/wEQya). I have no issue with him switching jobs, and going to the ACC school with the state of the art basketball facilities that UVA alum Jeff Kelberg keeps mentioning when he says they can't settle for mediocrity. He will be able to start coaching the team right away, and will be sitting on the Cavaliers bench all next season. (As the article shows, this also was a big surprise, because Bennett turned down the Indiana coaching spot last year, which led everyone to believe he probably planned to stay at Wazzu for a long time).

Meanwhile, the Cougars have players like soon to be sophomore Klay Thompson, the son of former Minnesota Gophers/Portland Trailblazers/L.A. Lakers great Mychal Thompson. Klay got upset and according to his father, wanted to go somewhere else, but dad calmed him down and reminded him that he'd have to sit out a year if he transferred to another school (a talk he likely had with oldest son Mychel last year, when Pepperdine coach Vance Walberg resigned mid-season). Why should Klay have to sit out though, if he wants to do the same thing his coach is doing?

I believe if the head coach of a school quits/is fired/goes to another school, kids from that team should be allowed to transfer with no penalty of sitting out a year, and kids who want to transfer to that team should be allowed to play right away as well. It wouldn't penalize kids who made this huge college decision based on a coach who is no longer going to be there, and it might give some other kids a chance to get more playing time, simply because kids who were recruited by the original coach want to go elsewhere.

That's really the only "fair" option, because heaven knows the NCAA would never make the coaches sit out a year, nor would that really make sense to anyone. Just even it out for the kids. Those Washington St. players are the ones who put the wins up on the board that made Tony Bennett desirable to a team on the other side of the country!

Meanwhile, the Washington St. head coaching spot is open now. According to the Seattle Times article by Bud Withers (the link found earlier in this blog), all 4 leading candidates have some sort of connection to my Gonzaga Bulldogs:

• Portland St. coach Ken Boone might not have coached with the Zags, but he holds the rare honor of having coached a team to victory at Gonzaga in the 2nd version of the "Kennel," the McCarthey athletic center. Since the new Kennel opened in the fall of 2004, the only opposing teams to win there have been Santa Clara, the aforementioned Washington St. (coached by Tony Bennett) and Portland St. this season.
• Ray Giacoletti just finished his 2nd year as an assistant coach for the Zags, after being the head coach at Utah and prior to that Eastern Washington, which is in the same general vicinity as Gonzaga & Washington St. He took a Gonzaga team known for being all offense and no defense, and turned them into the team that finished with the 2nd best opponent field goal shooting % in the country this season (after being #1 up until the last week of the season, when Memphis took over...speaking of schools where the head coach is about to take another job).
• Billy Grier, San Diego Toreros head coach. Prior to his last two years in the sunshine, and the 2008 NCAA tournament upset of UConn, Bill Grier spent 16 years as an assistant to Mark Few, Dan Monson & Dan Fitzgerald when they took their turns as head coaches of the Zags.
• Dan Monson, Long Beach St. head coach. He is, of course, the Gonzaga coach that started the string of 11 straight NCAA tournament appearances, and the only one to lead them to an Elite 8 (with both Mark Few & Billy Grier on his staff). Then he decided to take the money and head for the "greener pastures" of the Big Ten, and the sanction riddled Minnesota Gophers. Unfortunately, someone forgot to water the grass in those pastures, and he endured a long, bumpy, probably not all that fun ride in Minneapolis, but as a Gopher fan, I appreciate that he got the team out from under the weight of the scandal, and got the players back into class again! They didn't win enough though, so he was given the opportunity to resign before they were going to show him out the door if he didn't.

Odds are, one of these men will be named the new Washington St. Cougars head coach. I hope its someone that young sharpshooter Klay Thompson enjoys playing for over the next 3 years!