Caleb Love’s situation with Michigan highlights a problem with the transfer portal

In the world of college athletics, we tend to focus a lot on players’ abilities on the field/court quite a bit, as well as how they will fit in with their future team. However, because we are talking about college athletics, things aren’t always as cut and dry as a player being a good fit. Sometimes weird things like credits not transferring over to your future school keep you from ever joining your new team, which is exactly what happened with former Tar Heel Caleb Love.

It has been reported that the reason Love will not play for Michigan this fall is that he did not have the adequate amount of transferable credits. According to CBS Sports, it would’ve involved an extremely heavy class load this spring and summer for Love to be able to clear Michigan’s admissions requirements. What likely happened isn’t that Love didn’t take enough classes during his time at UNC, but that Michigan is really picky when it comes to what credits can transfer over. The frustrating thing about transferable credits is that every college across the country handles the situation differently, so Love should still be able to find a landing spot as long as he finds a school that will take the credits he has acquired.

From the outside looking in, it’s insane to think that one of the best players available in the NCAA Transfer Portal could be told to find another place to play basketball over an issue with credits, especially if we are to assume that he has been taking an adequate class load this entire time. One has to wonder how often this has happened with college transfers and it was just never reported. Colleges prioritize education as the number one priority (or so they say), but these athletes also make universities a ton of money. I’m not saying what should or shouldn’t happen with admissions at any given school, but it is an issue that athletes in the portal are going to have to navigate as long as the new transfer portal rules are in place.

As for where Love goes from here, it sounds like two schools to keep an eye on are Missouri and Indiana, per Adam Zagoria.

I hate it for Love that he wasn’t able to work things out with Michigan, but let this be a lesson to us all: we probably shouldn’t get too excited when players announce they’re transferring to UNC until all of the logistics are straightened out. We are in a really bizarre timeline of college basketball where being comfortable is almost impossible, and anything that could go wrong can indeed go wrong.