FB: North Coast Athletic Conference

[Patrick Coleman]

https://www.news-herald.com/2026/06/09/john-carroll-to-add-tyler-green-a-record-setting-qb-from-denison/ 

Does anyone else hate this as much as I do? I mean, I get this is how it works now, and I'm not mad at him or JCU. But to me an inter-conference transfer in D3, and maybe especially in the NCAC just feels - gross.

I don't know what I was expecting. Teams want to win, but I think maybe I was just hoping that the schools in the NCAC would try to prioritize helping athletes graduate as efficiently as possible and not poach student athletes. 

Curious as to why you want to assign the term "poach" to this. Tyler Green put himself in the portal in March, and in June announced he was going to JCU. Seems like a standard transfer situation to me, not John Carroll reaching out to him while he was still bound to Denison/before he entered the portal.

[maripp2002]

Curious as to why you want to assign the term "poach" to this.

Yes, he was in the portal, yes, he was looking to transfer, but in the same way every school can reach out, they also have the option not to reach out. As I said, most of the schools within the NCAC are very similar in makeup, and so hypothetically, someone could just decide to swap around schools until they found the right place to play and that seems against the spirit of being a teammate, if not against the rules.

I can't say why he's transferring, but it doesn't seem to be academically related, as Dennison has economics same as JCU does. It seems almost entirely football based, and I think that's what bugs me. I get that athletics are a part of many students lives, but I want to think that you do your diligence and check out all your options, and especially if you're paying for it, find the school that is the right fit for you the first time. It wasn't like he wasn't playing, he was, so it wasn't a looking for playing time situation.

It's super possible I'm just off base, but I don't love seeing what seem to be solely athletically motivated decisions in D3, because as a division, I think we've shown that's not really what it's about. I think of it as "poaching" because he's going up the win/loss ladder, a good team getting better and also making a conference rival worse, there isn't a term for that, but it feels like "poaching".

So, sure, let's not call it "poaching", but at the same time, I would love to see schools in the same conference try not to make approaching players in the portal the norm, at least before they've graduated. We know that the transfer portal is as much about seeing what kind of offers you can get as it is about actually being unhappy where you are.

It just rubs me the wrong way, and potentially I'm the only one, but it just doesn't feel right. Possibly I'm just old fashioned in that I think it's weird to transfer to a conference rival. The article mentions wanting to work in football, but also why not go to JCU to begin with? I can't really say.

Maybe it's a me problem but I don't like it.

[Patrick Coleman]

Someone who is in the portal has released from their previous school. They're a free agent. Insisting on some form of gentleman's agreement seems a little excessive, and a conference rule probably would not hold up if someone chose to challenge it.

Glad that in your penultimate sentence you did admit the differentiator that is pretty prominent in the story:

He's also thinking about life after he's done playing. Green is an economics major, and has hopes to one day work in an NFL front office. In that regard, there might not be a better institution in America for that career path. Currently, JCU has more than 40 individuals either coaching or in a front-office role in the NFL that graduated from JCU or was associated with the football program.