Re: transfers
Some have said that players transferring without penalty is just evening up the playing field since coaches can do the same. Well, not quite.
If a coach leaves before his/her contract is up, there are buyout clauses. The poaching...er, benefiting...school must pay the prior school for the privilege of gaining the coach's services to which the previous school was still entitled by contract.
To be an equal situation, any athlete could leave at any time as long as the new school reimbursed the previous school for some of the expense of recruiting, coaching expertise, medical care, scholarship benefits, etc. that had been provided to the athlete with the expectation of reaping the athletic efforts. The scholarship would be regarded as a contract...just not ironclad, in that the contract could be broken as long as some reimbursement was provided.
That is just hypothetical and wouldn't work since each athletes obviously has a different "value." Just as proposals to pay players raise new inequality issues, there would just have to be an "average" figure attached as a buyout sum regardless of the talent level. This wouldn't stop schools from poaching top talent, but it would hurt the less-talented role player athlete whose "buyout" likely wouldn't be worth it to their prospective new school, especially if they were moving down in divisions or moving to a less-well-heeled school.
Anyway, just pointing out that the two situations are different in terms of what the university gets in return for losing the services of a coach vs. an athlete. In the former, could be quite a large sum (which can be used to help hire a replacement). In the latter, the previous school gets nothing except bad publicity.