Looking at the legal side of Tez Walker’s case and what tipped the scales

My question is this, and I think I know the answer, even though I do not have a J.D. The legal move for somebody, anybody, is simply to say we think it is illegal for you to put restrictions on a second time transfer or a third time transfer. So here, I thought I was just being the lead, the good parrot, the fun parrot. Like, you can do what you want. You go to bed whatever you want.

You can have chocolate cake for breakfast, right? All that. As it turns out, I think I might be on the right side of the law. And I am excited to have stumbled into that. For that, we go to former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr.

You can follow him on Twitter because he is a great follow. Judge Bob Orr on Twitter. I know I asked you this question earlier for confirmation, but it does seem to me that the NCAA's vulnerability here is that you can't be free for the first time transfer and suddenly put restrictions on those athletes seeking to transfer a second time. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's definitely fair, but I would go a little bit further and say that why should there be any limitation on a college student being able to transfer and then play what is ostensibly an extracurricular sport at the school he transfers to? And one of the interesting things in all of this was that when Sports Illustrated took a shot at Coach Brown saying, well, all the coaches want to limit transfer portals. Coach Brown was very candid and said, yeah, we do. It's an inconvenience with all these transfers, but there needs to be a waiver process. But it clearly shows the only reason there's a limitation is that it makes it a little tougher job for the coaches and recruiters and athletic departments to predict who's going to be on the roster the next year.

But there's no legal reason why the young men and women shouldn't be able to transfer and play whatever. Judge Bob Orr is joining us here. I don't know. I probably do. Do people around town call you Judge Bob Orr?

They just call you Bob Orr. So this is a legal matter. And my understanding is that there's no new information. Could the NCAA legitimately be shaking in their boots right now that, wait a second, it's up. We're going to have to allow transfer. Either we put restrictions on all transfers or we allow everybody to transfer whenever they wish. I'm in the second camp with you. I think you and I have already, you know, bounced that around on Elon Musk's website.

But I do believe that they've got to go one way or the other. No. With SOTIC 2 for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, you could show off your skin again.

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Call 1-888-SOTYKTU to learn more. Well, it is the NCAA. So even if litigation was to be brought challenging the transfer limitations, you know, it's time and money and they'll fight it for as long as they think they've got a chance. But I go back to who is the NCAA? It's the universities that we all love and pull for on game day.

And so as soon as the university leadership decides, look, this is crazy. You know, we don't need to be declaring young men and women ineligible to play sports simply because they transferred. And I would remind folks, you can want to transfer anywhere in the country, but that school's got to let you in and that program's got to be willing to let you play. So if there's any problem in the transfer context, it's because the schools and the universities want it, but they don't want it too much for people going out. They're happy for people coming in, but they want to limit the ability for people to leave their programs. That'd be the universities used to be able to restrict where players could transfer to.

I don't believe they can do that anymore. I'm waiting for the NCAA to also declare Florida State defensive linemen. I think it's Darryl Walker. I think it's Darryl Jackson.

I think it's one of those two. I apologize for getting that wrong, but I'm waiting for them because he has got basically the same situation as Tez does in that and his grandmother, his family, is local to Tallahassee as opposed to Charlotte to Chapel Hill. Judge Bob Orr, retired North Carolina Supreme Court justice, is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show. I think, look, I was critical of just the notion of Josh Stein being involved. I was critical of the Governor Roy Cooper being involved because it opens up.

It creates a threshold for now rival fans to say, what about our players? But I think Josh probably did stumble on a vulnerability, and I wonder if that's not the new information that the NCAA has gotten, and it sounds like a repeat, but I wonder if Josh just kind of, maybe he knew what he was doing because I don't want to say that he didn't because he's a smart guy, obviously, but it almost like he stumbled on the Holy Grail. Well, in all due respect to our Attorney General, I think legally what he put in his life was what he put in his letter to the NCAA is certainly correct in the number of legal questions, antitrust violations that could be in play, but that was not what precipitated the NCAA's decision. There had to be actual new evidence on the grounds upon which UNC was seeking the waiver, and all my information is that there was, in fact, new evidence presented that perhaps was more tailored to the guidelines and standards, which were pretty general and pretty punitive, frankly, but there had to be an avenue for the NCAA to make this decision, and the new evidence avenue is the only one that I'm aware of that was left after all of the appeals had been exhausted, and certainly a lawsuit could have been filed, maybe you get a trial judge to issue a temporary restraining order, a preliminary injunction that somehow gets Tez back on the field, but that's a Hail Mary, whereas the new evidence passed, and this would be true for the athlete at Florida State, if the appeals have run, they need to get new evidence and submit it on that grounds, but I think this was clearly the case that once new information was provided to the to the NCAA compliance staff, it was like, okay, let's make this go away. You know, it does bring up the statements, and there were too many statements issued by people yesterday, the Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz' statement kind of contradicts, because he alludes to information that they just received, but that was not in the statements of Mac Brown or Bubba Cunningham, at least in Bubba Cunningham's statement, it might have been, but you almost had to read between the lines just to figure out where it was, and hopefully North Carolina will not need a Hail Mary tomorrow against Syracuse, and I'm setting the over-under at 700 receiving yards for Tez Walker, that might be overly optimistic.

Yeah, maybe it would just be a treat though, the young man and his family to be able to play, and you know, it's the right decision. I think there are lessons to be learned by universities and the fan base and the NCAA as to ways that these kind of problems could have been avoided. Now the NCAA tried to lay that snake on UNC and say, oh well, they didn't do what they were supposed to do, and I have not seen what UNC submitted, but I had no doubt that they felt like they had fully complied with whatever evidentiary standard they were supposed to come up with, and normally if you didn't have an adversarial relationship, if you didn't meet that standard, the NCAA would say, hey, here's what you need to do.

You know, you're missing these components of it, and you work towards a resolution. My experience with the NCAA is it's an adversarial process, and so once UNC's evidence quote didn't meet whatever they were looking for, and frankly UNC probably didn't know for sure what they were looking for, there seemed to just spiral down in trying to get the same result. It's like dealing with a bad home plate umpire. Was it Angel Hernandez?

That's right. The poster child of bad umpires. He's no good, but we all know this.

He'll probably show up in the baseball postseason somewhere because nobody can figure that out. Retired Supreme Court Justice in North Carolina, Bob Orr at Judge Bob Orr on Twitter. Thank you so much for your expertise, sir. I appreciate it. We'll talk again. Look forward to that. Thank you. Take care. Bob Orr here. I'm the Adam Goldschule.