(ThyBlackMan.com) Kansas State University is the latest school to find itself in the middle of a dispute involving a student-athlete wanting to leave their school to play sports for another school. Sophomore wide receiver Corey Sutton is not getting a release from his athletic scholarship at Kansas State despite announcing earlier this month that he planned to transfer. Kansas State head football coach Bill Snyder has been very adamant about not allowing Sutton to transfer. Snyder is following the path of many college football and college basketball coaches who have made a point of disallowing their athletes to leave their schools for other schools for nonsensical reasons.
College basketball and college football are extremely competitive 
sports. Recruiting for both sports has changed significantly over the past decade, with more an emphasis on securing the best talent at a very young age. There is even more attention on basketball and football recruiting on a national level from media and fans than ever before. When coaches secure the commitments of young men that they hope to mold into productive athletes, it is a significant deal for those coaches.
However, the situation with Corey Sutton and Kansas State highlights how controlling college coaches can be with the athletes on their teams. Sutton said he presented Kansas State with a list of 35 potential transfer destinations recently and Snyder denied his release to all 35 shortly after. Sutton said the list didn’t contain any Big 12 schools or teams on future Kansas State schedules.
Understandably, Bill Snyder would not want Sutton to play on a team that would compete against Kansas State for competition reasons but that is not the case in this instance. But Snyder’s explanation for not granting Sutton his release doesn’t make a lot of sense. Snyder said, “The feeling all along if you’re a No. 2 you probably want to be a No. 1. If you have the option to leave and you have 22 No. 2s on your team leaving you don’t have much of a team left.” Bill Snyder appears to believe that by allowing Corey Sutton to leave that other players on his team will leave because of playing time.
That is not sound reasoning but Snyder is following along a line of head coaches not allowing their athletes to move to other destinations. Another great college football coach, Alabama’s Nick Saban, had a long dispute with former Alabama defensive back Maurice Smith, who eventually transferred to Georgia, about Smith’s ability to transfer to another program. Even in college basketball, former Wisconsin head basketball coach Bo Ryan got into a contentious debate with former Iowa player Jarrod Uthoff about where Uthoff could transfer to after originally being on the Wisconsin team.
NCAA rules allow Corey Sutton to transfer to another school of his choosing with or without a release from Kansas State, but he is only allowed to receive financial aid from a different school next year if he receives his release from Kansas State. That is a significant financial component to this situation. Bill Snyder’s unwillingness to allow an athlete to move to a different situation in a sport where head coaches leave for better job situations frequently is very disappointing and makes the head coaches look more juvenile than the young athletes that they often claim they are developing as young men.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
