Jaylon Gibson stays in the ACC, which not long ago would have forced him away
There was a time, and not very long ago, when Jaylon Gibson’s decision to switch from Wake Forest to N.C. State would have imposed consequences so severe as to make it all but impossible, even with Wake Forest’s blessing.
Merely by signing a letter of intent with Wake Forest, without even enrolling in a class or accepting a penny of his scholarship, Gibson not only would have had to sit out a year, but would have lost an entire year of both eligibility and his scholarship if he wanted to enroll at another ACC school like N.C. State.
Of all the ACC’s draconian transfer rules, this was the harshest.
It left behind a long list of players who either ended up playing in other conferences — Montrezl Harrell ended up in the ACC anyway, when Louisville arrived — or fought the law and lost like Gus Gilchrist, who wasted an entire semester at Maryland in 2008 trying to get a waiver after originally signing with Virginia Tech, failed, and ended up at South Florida.
In February 2019, when the ACC quietly lifted restrictions on transfers within the conference, treating those players like any other, the letter-of-intent rule went with it, an ACC spokesman confirmed Friday.
The crazy part is that it lasted that long. Penalizing a player for choosing another ACC school even after being released from his letter of intent was the epitome of overreach. It served no purpose. If anything, it hurt the conference it was supposed to protect by ensuring players who wanted to play in the ACC went elsewhere.
Ostensibly, it was designed, like the ACC’s other transfer rules, to prevent schools within the conference from poaching each other’s players. In reality, it had only one job, and that was to remind the players who was really in charge, and if they wanted to leave one ACC school, they would have to leave them all.
Are you sure you really want out of that letter of intent? OK then. See you later.
Even as the pace of change within college athletics continues to accelerate — the NCAA decided against a one-time waiver of the rule that requires players to sit out a year when transferring, but that’s coming soon — a rule like this that seems almost criminal in its severity sat on the books until 15 months ago.
To the ACC’s credit, it has been among the leaders among the Power 5 conferences in further liberalizing transfer restrictions, but that the rule was there in the first place is also a measure of how far there is still to go. The NCAA’s movement toward letting players capitalize on their name, image and likeness rights was mainly symbolic despite the bold headlines — Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) worried whether the big announcement last week was a “bait and switch” — and players still face far more restrictions on their activities and movement than coaches or administrators, let alone their fellow students.
Still, this is good news for Gibson, a 6-11 forward from Raleigh who had signed with Wake Forest before Danny Manning was fired. Wake Forest agreed to release him from his letter of intent, and this week Gibson decided on N.C. State instead and will be eligible this fall. He didn’t need to appeal to the ACC or sacrifice a year of eligibility.
He just exercised the rights he should have always had anyway. As is so often the case, what’s good for the players also happens to be good for the ACC.
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 1:21 PM.
