A Michigan college student filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) claiming the sports-governing body's transfer rules kept him to move from Division I school to another school. The regulations stated that transferring will make him ineligible to play for a year.
According to New York Times, Peter Deppe, a 19 year old college athlete at Northern Illinois University filed the complaint in Indianapolis federal court on Tuesday. Deppe, who was a punter for NIU's Division I football team, wants to transfer to Iowa University. He also performed well academically, majoring in mechanical engineering and achieving a 3.1 grade point average. Iowa agreed to admit Deppe in November.
Deppe's lawsuit generally stated that "NCAA's transfer regulation deprives football players' ability to transfer to another Division I football team, which is "anticompetitive" and an "unlawful restraint" on fair competition that bars college-athletes from the freedoms enjoyed by other adults in this country," Business Wire cited.
The Almond, Michigan athlete was then redshirted on his freshman year and was to begin his eligibility for the 2015 season, with the support of NIU'd coaching staff. The Northern Illinois University's special team informed him on August 2014, that he will be granted with an athletic scholarship on the first month of 2015.
However, the said special team coach resigned and moved to the University of Kansas as the school's coach. He was then told by Rod Carey, the school's head coach that he would not be able to have the athletic scholarship. Deppe practiced with the team until August 17, 2015. However, after the Huskies recruited another punter, he received letters of release from the school in September 2015, Daily Chronicle reported.
Deppe's lawsuit seeks class action status for Division I football players since 2011, a voiding of the transfer rule, and unspecified damages. It also seeks to lift the cap on the number of football scholarships that a Division I school may award. "The NCAA's artificial transfer protocols unfairly punish students for circumstances out of their control," according to the plaintiff's representing lawyer, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.
