HOUSTON — Have you heard the one about Spike Albrecht, the University of Michigan’s senior point guard? He is seeking medical redshirt status because he missed most of this season after double hip surgery. Assuming he gets it, he’ll have a year of athletic eligibility left after he graduates. But if he is going to play college basketball as a graduate student, he will have to do it somewhere besides Michigan. Last year, his coach, John Beilein, told Albrecht and his father, Chuck, that “we’re one over for scholarships next year, and we’re recruiting a top point guard,” according to an article this week by Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports.  Yet even though he no longer had any use for Albrecht, Beilein was refusing to provide a waiver that would allow him to play for another Big Ten team. The transfer rule, of course, forces an athlete to sit out a year after switching programs, unless the current university waives the rule. (The transfer rule for graduate students is looser, but even so, Beilein could impose restrictions on Albrecht.)  “There are 334 other schools he can go to,” Beilein told Forde. “He has a lot of choices.” That may be, but his coach was still trying to place restrictions on him that no other college student would face if he or she wanted to switch universities.  More and more people are coming to see this as wrong, which is why articles like Forde’s, documenting transfer-rule abuses, have become commonplace. (On Friday morning, after a wave of criticism, Beilein reversed himself and said that Albrecht could go anywhere he wanted, including another Big Ten university.) Although the transfer rule has been around forever, it was long accepted as just the way things worked in college sports. Only in the last few years has it gotten the heightened scrutiny it deserves.  That scrutiny — not just of the transfer rule, but of many of the big issues facing the N.C.A.A. — was on display here Thursday afternoon when Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, held his annual March Madness news conference. The last time I saw Emmert meet the news media before a Final Four, in Atlanta in 2013, he was solo. (It was a disaster; feeling under siege, he lost his cool, as he later conceded.)  This time he had reinforcements: Harris Pastides, the president of the University of South Carolina and the chairman of the N.C.A.A.’s Division I board of directors, and Joe Castiglione, the athletic director at the University of Oklahoma, which, of course, is playing Villanova in the men’s tournament semifinals Saturday night. Castiglione is also chairman of the Division I men’s basketball committee.  Emmert et al. didn’t necessarily answer the questions posed — sidestepping pointed questions with bromides about “student-athletes” has become one of his specialties since that low point three years ago — but at least he was asked them. There were almost no exchanges about, you know, basketball. Rather, reporters wanted to know whether a new North Carolina law that has been criticized as permitting discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people would hurt the state’s chances of hosting a future tournament. “It will certainly be one of the variables,” he said, which I think means yes.  Emmert was asked whether the N.C.A.A. planned to seek an antitrust exemption from Congress if its amateurism rules were ever truly threatened by the courts. (O.K., I asked that question. I had recently seen a document in which Donald Remy, the association’s general counsel, told a group of faculty representatives that that was one possible course the N.C.A.A. could pursue. “Congressmen would have to act to keep their constituents happy,” he was quoted as saying. “This would lead them to rallying for antitrust protection.”) Emmert replied that there was no such plan — noting that the questions about the antitrust implications of its rules were still being hashed out in the courts, and might even wind up being decided by the Supreme Court.  My colleague Marc Tracy brought up the issue of a players’ union — and whether Emmert was opposed to player activism when it extended to other issues, like social justice. “The notion of athletes as employees who are unionized to negotiate for, you know, pay and benefits,” he replied, “is dramatically different than a group of students expressing their views and opinions on a social-justice question.” One could argue, of course, that athletes standing up for their rights is a social-justice issue, but never mind.  Emmert was asked a number of times about the association’s continuing investigation into the sham class scandal at the University of North Carolina (he wouldn’t comment) and whether Syracuse’s appearance in the Final Four, so soon after the university had been punished for infractions that also involved academic fraud, suggested that the N.C.A.A. penalties didn’t really have much potency. (Emmert disagreed.) Although I’m sure they are delighted to be here, the appearance of the Tar Heels and the Orange in the Final Four has served as a reminder that the N.C.A.A.’s mantra — education before athletics — is itself a sham.  Which brings me back to the transfer rule. What you mostly hear from critics of the rule is that it’s hypocritical: Coaches, after all, aren’t restricted in moving from one college to another, so why are the players? Sometimes a coach leaves right after recruiting a player — yet the player can’t leave. Jay Bilas, the former Duke player and current ESPN basketball analyst, told me that when he had once brought this up to the N.C.A.A. during his playing days, he was told that “you are joining an institution, not a coach.”  But it is more than just the hypocrisy. The transfer rule exemplifies the way the N.C.A.A. and the college sports establishment strip athletes of rights that our country’s laws guarantee not only to other college students, but to all Americans. There are few N.C.A.A. rules that are as blatantly unfair.  At the University of Georgia, which had routinely granted transfer waivers, the new football coach, Kirby Smart, decided to change the policy. When running back A. J. Turman asked to be released recently, Smart told him that he could not transfer to Miami or Florida, even though Turman had grown up in Florida. Smart didn’t want “to set a precedent,” he said. Coaches often say that they don’t want athletes to be able to follow a coach who has left to run another program. Or that, because they have trained and taught an athlete, the player somehow owes the college and shouldn’t be allowed to leave.  But colleges and companies train people all the time who then go on to competitors. If a talented engineering student decides to transfer from M.I.T. to Stanford, should M.I.T. be able to prevent her from going because it taught her computer science? It is silly to even suggest such a thing. General Electric develops plenty of managers who then go to work for competitors. That’s life. When the Jets cut a player, there is nothing preventing him from signing with their archrivals, the Patriots.  Why should it be different for college athletes? Steve Berman, a lawyer who is suing the N.C.A.A. over the transfer rule, told me recently that his legal argument was pretty simple: “It is an illegal restraint of trade.”  At the news conference, Emmert and the others were asked why the N.C.A.A. was taking so long to come up with changes in the transfer rule; it has apparently been under discussion ever since the five major conferences, known as the Power 5, won greater autonomy early last year. (As part of the autonomy deal, the Power 5 gave the N.C.A.A. membership two years to come up with transfer-rule changes they could all live with; otherwise the Power 5 would make their own changes to the rule and let the rest of the N.C.A.A. fend for itself.)  All three of the speakers insisted that the association was working as hard, and as quickly, as it could. “The challenge is, it is really hard to find the right way to resolve it,” Emmert said. Pastides said that while he was in favor of allowing players to transfer more freely, “we don’t want to encourage the miscreant coach” who would use the ease of transfers to get rid of an athlete who was “thriving as a student.” Castiglione said that not every transfer request could be resolved the same way because of “the uniqueness” of each case. Et cetera.  Afterward, Castiglione took questions from a small huddle of reporters who wanted him to tell the story of how he had lured Oklahoma’s basketball coach, Lon Kruger, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2011. Castiglione, who is an entertaining storyteller, told a long tale about how he had approached Kruger a number of times and finally persuaded him to agree to the move, even though Kruger and his wife had just moved into their dream house in Las Vegas. (It helped that Castiglione gave his new coach a seven-year, $16.6 million contract.)
It can be argued that the transfer rule, which restricts player movement, even as coaches come and go freely, is another way college sports strip athletes of their rights.