Nate Oats shares his thoughts on NCAA's new one-time transfer rule

The world of college athletics turned on its head Wednesday afternoon with the NCAA passing a rule that will allow student-athletes to transfer, of any sport, to transfer one-time and be immediately eligible. 

An athlete who has already transferred once cannot transfer a second time and be eligible immediately, unless they acquire a wavier from the NCAA.

Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats has taken good use of the transfer portal since he has arrived in Tuscaloosa, adding pieces like former West Virginia guard James "Beetle" Bolden and former Villanova guard Jahvon Quinerly in his first year to former Yale forward Jordan Bruner in his second. 

Two of the Crimson Tide's three late additions to it's fifth-best 2021 recruiting class also have come via the portal in former Texas Tech guard Nimari Burnett and former Furman forward Noah Gurley. 

In that aforementioned first season at the helm, Oats experienced the negative side of it, with Quinerly being denied the chance to play when he first stepped first on campus back in the fall of 2019. 

When speaking to the media on Wednesday, Oats shared his thoughts on what the new rule could mean for college basketball, expressing concern about a stricter wavier policy for two-time transfers.

"I mean it's kind of gotten to that point," Oats said. "It would have been nice if it was there before because it seemed pretty arbitrary with who they were granting waivers to and who they weren't. For whatever reason, we ended up on the bad side of that one with Quinerly, which made no sense to me at all, and still doesn't make sense so at least now everybody is eligible. So if you wanna transfer, transfer. You get it one time. After you get it one time, now you have to sit. 

"To me, the question is what are they going to do with the two-time transfer. Is that going to be a wavier process? After once, you've had two tries now so you would have to make it pretty clear on what that wavier policy would be to get eligible on the second one."

At the moment, Alabama is one of three Power 6 programs that has no active player in the transfer portal. Michigan and UCLA are the other two. However, the Crimson Tide remain one scholarship above the NCAA's limit of 13. 

Oats is confident the numbers will play out at the end of the day but prides himself on leading that a program that values players and encourages them to want to stay. 

"I'm fine with it," Oats added. "I'll say this, you do a good job, win, treat players well, then players wanna be here. Something has to give here with our scholarship numbers at some point. I think we have done a good job of making this a program that the players feel — most players that come into Division 1 want to get better and if they feel like they are doing that and getting treated well, then you have a lot better chance at keeping them around. 

"Player development is atop the list of our priorities. I think we are making players better. We treat them really well. The University of Alabama, the entire athletic department, players, student-athletes get treated extremely well here. They are more than well taken care of between their nutrition, our training facilities, our staff, our strength and conditioning coaches. There's a lot of stuff going on here. So we have not had the downside of the portal really. We have gotten the positive side of it, being able to add some pieces each year. 

"Hopefully we can continue to add pieces and not lose pieces that we would like to retain if that makes sense."