Charlie Baker: Athletes entering transfer portal at high rate stems from pandemic recruitment

For nearly three years, high school recruits were only allowed to take virtual, or abbreviated tours to colleges that were interested in their services.

With most being wide-eyed 18-year-olds once they arrive on campus, it’s hard to jump into an environment that you’ve never visited. Things turn out not as expected and a change of scenery might be what’s necessary to put them in the best place to succeed.

NCAA President Charlie Baker pointed out this fact, noting that kids looking for a second chance should be allowed one true recruitment where they can visit schools in person and make relationships with coaches face-to-face rather than across a screen.

“We have a lot of students entering the portal in their fifth or sixth year of eligibility. … We also have the classes of 2024 and 2025 that didn’t get to visit the school they had to choose,” Baker said during the College World Series broadcast between Stanford and Tennessee. “If you look at the number of students period that have been transferring for the past few years, the numbers are really high.

“There is a lot of movement driven by the fact that they had two years where these kids didn’t get to visit a school before they had to choose where they wanted to go.”

Baker, a former governor of Massachusetts, assumed the role of NCAA President on March 1, 2023. He replaced Mark Emmert, who had served in the role since 2010. Baker takes over the NCAA in the midst of a tumultuous time in college sports, with changes like NIL and the transfer portal changing the way college athletics are handled and seems to be more understanding of the ever-moving landscape than his predecessor.

NCAA president Charlie Baker sides with IRS ‘ruling’

NCAA president Charlie Baker is in agreement with the Internal Revenue Service‘s stance on nonprofit collectives and is not ruling out more governance being issued on NIL. 

In a 12-page memo released from the office of the IRS Chief Counsel this past Friday, the revenue service believes donations made to nonprofit NIL collectives are not tax-exempt. 

Some of the most aggressive collectives have applied and been deemed as 501(c)(3) organizations by the IRS. That does not mean, however, that the IRS has to sign off on their activity. With more than 200 NIL collectives across the Division I landscape, roughly 80 have been deemed as nonprofits. 

“In the context of what NIL is supposed to be about and how it is supposed to work and what it is supposed to provide, which is a service for an entity that is basically making what we’d describe as a business expense … yeah, it should be treated as a taxable event,” Baker told Sports Illustrated in an interview at the annual National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics in Orlando. 

What the impact of the IRS memo is moving forward remains to be seen.

On3’s Pete Nakos contributed to this report