The second in a two-part series.



EUGENE -- From 2011 until 2014, college athletes with a degree in hand and unused eligibility who wanted to transfer into the Southeastern Conference and play immediately could not, despite an NCAA rule green-lighting just such a move.



The SEC had opted out of the rule and replaced it with a more vigorous waiver process.



Blame it on Jeremiah Masoli, perhaps.



In 2010, before the approval of the NCAA rule -- called the graduate transfer exception -- the Oregon Ducks kicked Masoli off the team less than six months after he helped lead the program to its first Rose Bowl appearance in 15 years, but he soon graduated. At Mississippi, Masoli found a football team in need of a quarterback and a graduate program not offered by UO: parks and recreation. After a brief fight with the NCAA, which initially denied an appeal to play immediately, Masoli's waiver was accepted.



The next year, just as the NCAA was set to add the graduate-transfer exception in the rule book, the SEC stopped accepting such transfers.



"We're not interested in athletes coming for the purpose of one year and then moving on," then-commissioner Mike Slive said.



With talented transfers headed elsewhere, the conference relented on its ban in 2014. Yet the standoff underscored the consternation that still surrounds the rule, about whether athletes and schools are abiding by the rule's spirit -- to benefit the athlete, as well as the student -- as well as its letter.



It is a concern as old as the rule itself. Born in 2005 as an NCAA-proposed reward for athletes who graduated with unused eligibility, the graduate transfer exception died within a year of its approval in 2006 amid heavy protest, but was resurrected as a waiver process until 2010, when a newer version crafted by the Mountain West Conference earned approval in the NCAA rulebook, where it has stayed ever since -- though not without much debate.



The 2010 rule that endures today approves such transfers if students have graduated with at least a bachelor's degree, have had their financial aid discontinued by their previous college and have unused athletic eligibility. The aid criteria is largely perfunctory, as universities almost always cut aid once a player asks for his or her release.



The rule was again highlighted in February when Vernon Adams Jr., a record-setting quarterback in three seasons as Eastern Washington's starter, announced his transfer to Oregon.



Like Tyler Krieg, Adams' motivation was to move from football's shadows to its center stage. Krieg, a Tualatin native and two-year starter on Duke's offensive line, became one of the first to graduate and play immediately elsewhere in 2006, when he left a 10-loss Blue Devils team for a 10-win California squad. He now works in Portland selling benefits for an insurance company, and has watched Adams' transfer and subsequent heroics on the field for UO from a unique perspective that is both close to the rule and -- less than a two-hour drive away from Eugene -- the player who is the latest to embody it.



"If you go get your degree you should have the flexibility to go on and pursue another degree and play for another squad," Krieg said. "The bottom line is coaches don't want to lose that control. When you have four seasons to play college football, I don't care whose feelings you're hurting -- you only have four seasons."



By transferring from the Football Championship Subdivision into the Pac-12, one of the five most powerful conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision, Adams found the recognition he lacked at Eastern Washington, and then some.



From the warmth of a new fanbase's welcome to the burning criticism that followed his saga of passing a final math test to gain admission to Oregon in August -- his results were discussed breathlessly in real-time on social media -- Adams has felt the full range of that spotlight's reach.

* * *

Within hours of Adams' announcement, however, the quarterback wasn't the only subject in the limelight. So was the rule that paved the way for such a move.



"We are not sure that this was the actual intent of the legislation when it was approved," Eastern Washington athletic director Bill Chaves said at the time of Adams' announcement.



For its part the Mountain West, which sponsored the 2010 legislation that ultimately passed, does not believe the rule has been corrupted purely for athletic gains under the guise of academics.



"It continues to provide opportunities for student-athletes, which was the key of the proposal," said Javan Hedlund, a conference spokesman.





Offensive lineman Tyler Krieg, a Tualatin native, became one of the first to use an NCAA rule that allowed graduates to transfer and play immediately in 2006, when he left Duke with a diploma bound for Cal, where he and the Bears won 10 games the following season.

Roderick McDavis, the Ohio University president who heads the NCAA's Division I Committee on Academics, agrees that the 2010 rule was put in place to provide opportunities athletes otherwise wouldn't have rather than hold them accountable for finishing. The NCAA doesn't penalize athletes for falling short of completing a graduate program as it does using its Academic Progress Rate for undergrads. But an October proposal by the academic committee now seeks to ensure athletes at least make progress toward that pursuit.



Under current rules graduate student-athletes, whether they have transferred or not, must take six credit hours per term of post-graduate studies. The committee's new proposal would require at least six hours of classes each quarter to directly apply to an athlete's chosen graduate program. The earliest it could go into effect is 2017, McDavis said, and would cover a small but growing group. According to NCAA data, 3.8 percent of Division I's 21,332 football players in 2014 were postgraduates, up from 2.0 percent in 2007. And across all sports, 2.0 percent of Division I athletes are postgraduates, up from 1.4 percent in 2007.



"We don't think there's a crisis out there, but what we do believe is that there's a growing tendency for more student-athletes to move in this direction," McDavis said. "We thought let's get out on the front end of this and put a rule in place before it reaches that level where there is some kind of major concern."



It is unclear how the graduate-transfer exception will eventually be tweaked but discussions are ongoing. The NCAA formed a working group in the spring to study issues related to transfers and the graduate-transfer is among them. In announcing the committee's creation, the NCAA hinted at one possible change.



"The group will discuss whether that policy should be consistent with the undergraduate transfer policy, which requires students competing in baseball, basketball, bowl subdivision football and men's ice hockey to sit out of competition for a year after transferring," the NCAA wrote. "The new policy allows those students to request a waiver to extend the number of years they have to complete their eligibility, but they can no longer request a waiver to compete immediately."



The possibility of an APR-style tool to reward and penalize schools for post-graduate athletes' studies has been discussed, as well. Chaves, the Eastern Washington athletic director, joined the transfer issue committee two months after Adams' transfer. He declined to be interviewed.



So is Adams -- just one of hundreds of grad transfers yet one of the most-publicized -- to blame?



The unique nature and national attention of Adams's case brought the rule to the forefront of public discussion for many, but discussions surrounding changes to the rule have been ongoing at the NCAA and conference level for several years.



No individual athlete's transfer sparked the academic committee's proposal to toughen which classes grad students take, McDavis ensured. He has heard of Adams, however.



"Just a little, not a lot," McDavis said. "I know about it in general."

* * *

Matt Hegarty transferred from Notre Dame to Oregon this summer and has started every Ducks game at center.

If the proposal to add rigor to graduates' class loads has been "very well-received," McDavis said, in the academic community, it earned shrugs in Oregon.



It's not that Krieg, Oregon head coach Mark Helfrich or UO's two graduate transfers, Adams or starting center Matt Hegarty, believe the academic proposal's intentions are misguided.



"You can't abuse your master's school," Krieg said, but the timing of football season allows otherwise; football players are free to leave often after just one academic quarter.



Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald only accepts graduate transfers who have the "full intention" of earning their degree, he told the Chicago Tribune in August. Helfrich, in his third year as head coach, said his discussions with Hegarty and Adams during their recruitments similarly touched on their intentions of finishing their respective one-year programs. Adams is in interdisciplinary studies focused on media, journalism, sports and business. Hegarty studies family and health services, with a focus on counseling.



The objections, rather, come from whether the increased scrutiny on graduate student-athletes is deserved at all.



Stories of graduated athletes who stay at their original school but take only a few credits during a season to stay eligible are widespread and draw headlines, but provoke little of the hand-wringing of the graduate-transfer exception. In recent years, athletes have won more protections for their welfare, such as guaranteed four-year scholarships and cost of attendance, and the recommendation of toughening an post-grad athlete's class load strikes Helfrich as more restrictive on principle, and thus out of line with prevailing attitudes.



"You've earned the right for that independence," Helfrich said. "You've paid your, I don't know what the right word is -- debt. They've met the requirements of what this should be all about. I think it's going to be very difficult in a player-welfare type of situation to get that passed, but we'll see."



An October NCAA report found that 28 percent of football players who graduate and transfer earn a post-graduate degree within two years, the lowest of any NCAA sport. Told of the figure, Hegarty acknowledged it could feed into the perception of post-grad athletes as "hired guns" available for one season. But he believes it doesn't tell the entire story, and like Adams, Hegarty cited the freedom of coaches and administrators to leave for better opportunities without penalty.



"A lot of the people who are in these situations, myself included, have these NFL aspirations," said Hegarty, who is unsure whether he will leave school during the winter academic quarter to train for the spring NFL draft. "I've already talked to a lot of the program directors I'm working with and she talked to me about how I can take a leave of absence from the university for those few semesters. ... I would like to someday finish it. It's a reason I came here."





Oregon quarterback Vernon Adams Jr. (3) warms up prior to Friday's Civil War victory against Oregon State. Adams has the second-highest passer rating in FBS and the highest yards per attempt average, at 10.2, while leading UO to a 9-3 regular-season record.

Between meetings, medical treatment and practices, athletes' schedules are limited for finding classes in-season, Hegarty said, adding it could be difficult to find six applicable credit hours offered in that break from football responsibilities. He spoke in the hypothetical, because he's made it work: during Oregon's fall academic quarter, he's taken more than six credit hours toward his program. On Monday evenings, he arrives late to evening football meetings due his class schedule.



"It's not great," said Hegarty, who earned an undergraduate degree at Notre Dame from a business school ranked the nation's best by Bloomberg Businessweek. "But, I'm able to sink my teeth into it and get a little bit of the master's."



This winter, Adams will take a break from his online classes at Oregon. Instead, he said he will devote his focus to training for the NFL. Standing 5-foot-10 at a position where front offices prefer statuesque height, and after missing large chunks of his last two seasons with a broken foot and finger, respectively, Adams has a hazy future in professional football despite owning the second-highest passer rating in the NCAA's Football Bowl Subdivision this season.



In a best-case scenario, he hopes to carve out a career the same way as undersized Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson -- whom Adams calls as an inspiration, and whose transfer from North Carolina State to Wisconsin remains perhaps the most famous use of the graduate-transfer exception.



An NFL career for Adams would have seemed outlandish five years ago, when only Eastern Washington and Portland State offered him a scholarship, but so, too, was the thought of a bachelor's degree: His diploma from EWU is his family's first. Which is why, he said, he is serious about completing his studies even if his motive for transferring was to impress NFL scouts on a bigger stage.



"I'm going to come back and finish, whether it's next year, a couple years, a couple months," Adams said. "I'll come back and finish it."



Football won't last forever, he noted. For his future, however, a graduate degree might just add a bit more insurance.



-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif