College Sports Reform

UWF’s Lumpy DeWeese Takes the Transfer Portal Fight to Capitol Hill

The senior football player joined coaches like Kelvin Sampson and John Calipari in Washington to push the Protect College Sports Act, then flew home in time for Sunday night practice.

UWF senior Lumpy DeWeese spent Monday doing something most college football players never do: standing in Washington, D.C., arguing for federal legislation. He was one of three athletes representing the ASUN Conference, the most represented league at a special press conference for the Protect College Sports Act, a bill aimed at bringing order to what DeWeese calls the “pandemonium” of modern college athletics.

• DeWeese joined me on Rick’s Blog Live this week to talk about that trip, the bill, and what it’s like to watch your own locker room turn over almost entirely every year.

A Locker Room in Flux

DeWeese knows the churn firsthand. He transferred to UWF after a coaching change at Stetson, where his freshman class came in around 50 players deep.

• “My sophomore year that ended up being around fifteen, and now I think there’s probably ten, maybe ten of us left,” he said of his old Stetson class. At UWF, he estimates the roster brings in 50 to 60 new players every year, which means learning an entirely new team every spring, then adjusting again before fall camp.

He supports the bill’s core transfer restriction: generally one free transfer per athlete, with exceptions for coaching changes or harassment situations. Without it, he argues, players are essentially free agents, getting “tampered with by former teammates or former coaches” and bouncing between four or five schools with little regard for academics.

What the Bill Actually Does

DeWeese pointed to several provisions he sees as central to fixing the current chaos:

• One free transfer, with narrow exceptions for coaching changes or harassment
• A locked-in five-year eligibility window, running from ages 19 to 24
• Antitrust protections for athletic conferences, aimed at stopping the current wave of lawsuits filed in local courts against the NCAA and conferences
• Health insurance coverage for athletes for five years after graduation, covering injuries and conditions that linger past a playing career
• New restrictions on agents, targeted at what DeWeese calls “predatory agents” who go after college athletes for commission rates far higher than agents can charge NFL players

“I think the people who support it really shows how important it is. To have Coach Saban go and testify, then Coach Calipari, Coach Few, Coach Samson from Houston, all these legendary coaches, they know what college sports is supposed to look like.”

DeWeese said he got to talk with several of the coaches at the press conference, including John Calipari, whose son recently started coaching, giving him a personal stake in fixing the system before the next generation inherits it.

How He Ended Up in D.C.

The trip came together fast. Staff from the Senate Commerce Committee reached out weeks earlier asking DeWeese to write an op-ed on the bill, which ran in Inweekly. Last week, he got word of the press conference while on the team bus, ran it by Coach Nobles and the UWF athletic department, then joined a Zoom call with ASUN conference staff before flying to Washington on a bye week.

• The itinerary: fly up Monday, film a commercial, attend the press conference, fly home in time for Sunday night practice.

Back on campus, it’s game week. DeWeese and No. 20 UWF host Austin Peay at Pen Air Field on Saturday in a matchup he’s already sizing up, including a familiar face: Markell Redding, a high school opponent now playing for Austin Peay.

• We’ll keep tracking the Protect College Sports Act on ricksblog.biz as it heads toward a Senate vote.