Pollard Address MBB Transfers

Jamie Pollard Addressed the Men's Basketball transfer epidemic today as reported by Keith Murphy.  In pure "crotchety old man" form he calls out "kids these days".  I'm not disagreeing with him.  There are a lot of problems with transfers in Men's college basketball.  The problem as it relates to Iowa State isn't taht there are transfers, it's that over the last three years they have had more transfers than ANY OTHER BCS SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY.

Using information compiled from Jeff Goodman’s Fox sports blog I narrowed down his lists of transfers to Big Six conference colleges.  Why do this?  Because they are ISU’s peers.  I don’t care how many transfers UMKC had over the last 3 years (a shocking 9 by the way) and how it relates to ISU.  They don’t compete against them and it’s a totally different playing field.  I care about how ISU is doing compared to the Big 12 and other major conferences.  Here is how they stack up.

There are 73 Big Six teams.  55 had transfers in the last 3 years.  There were 131 transfers from those schools over the last 3 years.  ISU had the most of any Big Six school with 7.

The average number of transfers per school per year was .598.  ISU’s average number of transfers per year is 2.33.  I was an English major but it looks to me like we’re more than a whole standard deviation off. 

Additionally, just by a quick count it appears that there are at least 16 of the transfers are after a coaching change.  Could be more or less I just eyeballed it.

Listen, I know Pollard is in the spin zone and I know transfers are an issue in Men’s College basketball.  But stuff like this insults the fanbase.  I’d rather him not comment.  When ISU is worse off than any other BCS conference school it’s not just the lazy ungrateful kids or it would be this bad everywhere.

These numbers don't even include the number of guys who have been kicked off, left for the motherland, or any other sort of issue that has arisen during the last 3 years.

Plus, what does this say about a great kid like Scott Christopherson who played his heart out for the Clones this year while sick and who is a huge fan favorite?  Was he running from his problems instead of dealing with them?  Is he going to struggle to survive in the real world?  I don’t think he will.

(Note:  I admit there was some manual calculation here and my numbers COULD be off somewhat.  I have attached the spreadsheet I used to compile the information from Goodman’s Blog in case anybody is wondering what I used.)

 08-09-10 Transfers

Pollard’s Statement: http://gazetteonline.com/blogs/the-hlog/2010/04/16/iowa-state-ad-jamie-pollard-addresses-cyclone-basketballs-transfer-mania  

2010: http://community.foxsports.com/goodmanonfox/blog/2010/04/14/first_edition_of_end-of-year_transfer_list

2009: http://community.foxsports.com/goodmanonfox/blog/2009/05/13/transfer_list_updated

2008: http://community.foxsports.com/goodmanonfox/blog/2008/06/22/updated_and_ridiculous_transfer_list