MORGANTOWN — By now you’ve already formed an opinion about the inner workings of the NCAA, and that opinion was likely made long before the news broke Tuesday that WVU men’s basketball forward RaeQuan Battle was denied eligibility this season for a second time.
We are not here today to try and change your opinion, and we’re certainly not going to defend the decision to deny Battle an opportunity to play basketball this season. He will be eligible to play next season.
With the amount of tragedy and adversity the young man has been through in his life, the very least the NCAA could have done was rubber stamp the approval and move on.
To be sure, that would be the same opinion if Battle was enrolled at Duke or Kansas rather than West Virginia.
That didn’t happen, and what we are here to do today is try and explain why.
For the most part, I, like many of you, believe the NCAA is incompetent and cowardly and clings to too many outdated ideas it uses to run the organization.
The NCAA is not, however, made up of a bunch of heartless tyrants looking to only help those who help it, while holding everyone else down.
Rest assured that everyone who saw Battle’s case file, either in the NCAA or the appeals committee that denied him a second time Tuesday was well aware of the heartache Battle has endured over his life.
“The intent of the transfer waiver process is to provide relief for extenuating and extraordinary circumstances that are outside the control of the student-athlete,” was part of WVU’s reaction from the news. “There is no question that RaeQuan’s case clearly calls for a waiver so that he can continue his academic and athletic career on a positive tract.”
Before we go any further, the NCAA never makes public its reasoning, well, for much of anything, and WVU’s statement of reaction did not include any information as to why Battle’s case was denied.
All we have is an educated guess, and the thought from here is the NCAA and the appeals committee saw Battle’s situation as something more than just a tragic backstory.
WVU’s angle for a waiver centered around the mental health and mental well-being angle the NCAA set out as a guideline last March as one of the exceptions it would make in allowing athletes to retain their eligibility after a second transfer before earning a college degree.
In denying Battle’s eligibility, the NCAA must have believed his transfer to WVU was about improving his athletic standing and not about maintaining good mental health.
The NCAA could have made the argument if Battle’s mental well-being was in question, then he probably shouldn’t have transferred from the University of Washington to begin with.
Washington’s campus is just a 40-minute drive from his Tulalip tribe, his home, his family and, by far, where his largest support group is found.
Yet, in two seasons with the Huskies, Battle didn’t play all that much. His stats probably were not what he hoped for, and the Huskies were an awful program, going a combined 20-38 during his time there.
So, he used his free transfer to go to Montana State, roughly 700 miles away from home.
At Montana State, he thrived last season, averaging 17.7 points a game. He led the Bobcats to the NCAA tournament and scored 27 points in a first-round loss against Kansas State.
Suddenly, Battle became a known commodity again and likely had many suitors out there other than WVU when he decided to enter the transfer portal a second time after Montana State coach Danny Sprinkle resigned to become the head coach at Utah State.
Going off that interest in Battle, the NCAA could see an angle that his second transfer was to simply play big-boy basketball one last season.
If this was, indeed, the NCAA’s opinion of Battle’s case, at the very least it can be argued it holds water.
The NCAA, especially in the NIL era, is going to rightfully crack down on athletes transferring from one school to the next as a sort of free agent looking for the next NIL payday.
Again, where it concerns Battle’s situation, the NCAA and the appeals committee made the wrong call. Yet, by taking a neutral step back, we can at least understand why the NCAA made the tough decision it did.
