one blog glory

How is the school tethered to the athlete? By that one-year, renewable scholarship. Schools can drop a player for no reason, and the player has no recourse to get his scholarship back. If an athletic director fires a pro-style offensive football coach and replaces him with a coach who runs the option, every quarterback on the roster becomes expendable. If a run-and-gun hoops coach gets canned in favor of a bleed-the-shot-clock defensive whiz, then the hair-trigger point guard becomes dead weight. Can these athletes leave for another school of their own volition? Sure. If they want to sit out a year or fight for a waiver they may not get that would allow them to play immediately.
This is the part where the anti-athlete faction usually chimes in to say athletic scholarships should be no different than academic scholarships, which are almost universally annually renewable based on a series of scholastic benchmarks. That argument works only to a point. Here is where an athletic scholarship differs from an academic scholarship: Georgia Tech will not allow a new president to suddenly convert the campus to a liberal arts college and yank the scholarships of engineering students so he can recruit more philosophy majors. Universities do not alter their missions overnight. College sports teams — especially college football and basketball teams — alter their missions overnight relatively frequently.