Alabama’s Nate Oats says SEC shouldn't crack down on intra-league transfers

You guys have a few guys who have played at other SEC schools before they joined your team. There was reportedly a vote that was tabled to implement a one-year sitting period for guys who transfer within the SEC. I just was curious about your opinion on that and also, I guess, just what guys who transfer in the league kind of bring with that experience. Yeah, I'm glad that they tabled that vote. I didn't think it made much sense. I think it would have hurt the SEC. We're getting the best players in the country. I mean, you look at every year that, you know, guards been sending out after the NBA draft where the SEC compares to the other leagues. We've got more pros in the NBA than anybody else in the other league in the country. We're recruiting more pros as freshmen. And then sometimes it doesn't work out. And like you said, we've got Aiden Holloway, you know, maybe struggled a little bit as freshman year. He played well for us. Brandon Garrison's transferred in. Jamari and Davis Fleming transferred in. We're super happy with all three of them. I think they're going to have great years for us. But we've also had guys leave us and go to other schools in the SEC. I mean, Mo Diabate's been great for Kentucky. Now he's at LSU. Darion Reed's been really good at Oklahoma. So sometimes it works both ways. And I think if you said you had to sit out a year, one, you lose. I mean, I think we probably have a third of the top 100 players in the transfer portal, I would guess. I don't have the exact numbers coming out of the SEC every year, so then all of a sudden we're going to say we don't have access to a big majority of the best players in the portal. Well, that doesn't help anybody in the league. And then if you're going to say that, now school agents, everybody's going to have reservations on do we even go to an SEC school right out of the gate as a freshman. So I think it was smart that they tabled it. Hopefully it never gets brought back up again because I just think unless everybody in the country is going to do it, it doesn't make sense to hamstring yourself as the only, you know, power four conference in the country doing this. So unless the Big Ten, the Big 12, ACC, Big East, everybody else is going to do this, like it just doesn't make any sense to do it in my opinion.