By: TJ Hartnett

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

I’m going to talk about Maurice Smith, and I’m going to warn you: I know almost nothing about this situation, about transfer rules, about eligibility or really about anything that resembles a detail in this situation.

However, I’m going to talk about Smith and Alabama and Georgia anyway. So to sum up my understanding of this situation, Maurice Smith wants to transfer to UGA after he graduates, which he will have done by the time you read this.

He’s played for Alabama for three years, but wants to go play for his former defensive coordinator Kirby Smart at UGA this season, which – if he were allowed to transfer – he would immediately be eligible to do.

Alabama, however, is refusing to allow Smith to transfer to another SEC school, despite allowing Chris Black to do so under similar circumstances.

So, Nick Saban and Alabama are citing an SEC rule that backs them up, and that’s great for them; but it shines yet another light on the bass ackwards treatment of these so-called “student athletes” that play college sports.

You have so many college football players that show up so that they can get drafted, not bothering to complete their education. They get chewed up and spit out by the NCAA money-making machine, eventually moving on to play a few years as a professional, if they’re lucky.

I won’t defend the usage of these boys and girls by the NCAA, but let’s for the moment accept that those particular cases are there for sports and sports alone.

Then there are players who play a college sport while actually attempting to receive an education and graduating, like Maurice Smith.

I don’t know what his major is and I don’t care either, the guy is getting a degree in something, he’s doing more than just showing up to get drafted.  But now it seems as though he’s being held hostage by the very sport that paid for his education.

Ostensibly a school’s goal is to provide an education, or prepare its student body for a life beyond higher learning. Instead, so many schools collect money and many collect from football.

If any student that wasn’t a football player wanted to transfer from Alabama to Georgia, they would be granted that transfer. After all, it’s a young adult’s choice where they want to be educated, which again, is a college’s desire, right?

Well, not if it could negatively affect the money making machine that is college football. No, there are bylaws against a football player going and playing for another team in the conference, because football takes precedence above all things.

Forget that this guy actually tried to learn something, his real purpose is to generate cash flow by playing on the gridiron. Smith isn’t being treated like a person with choices, he’s being treated like a currency printing press; one that doesn’t get to keep any of that currency, despite how much he helps create.

Look, I said at the top that I don’t know the situation of Maurice Smith and his transfer woes all that well. It’s true, but this isn’t really about Smith as a person (does that make me just as bad as the SEC?), it’s about the control college football welds over both the educational system it is supposedly just a part of and the young men that come to be a part of it.

Is it a problem that I know how to fix? Absolutely not, but it’s worth talking about.

A young person, pursuing happiness, isn’t given the freedom to leave a public school and go play football at a different public school. It’s the rules I guess, but that doesn’t make it right.