Marve Might Walk on With Vols, but How Much Will He Matter?

As a high school senior in Tampa, Fla., in 2007, Robert Marve passed for 48 touchdowns and over 4,000 yards. The final pass of his prep career was a touchdown with 17 seconds remaining in the state title game. With big numbers and clutch performances, Marve was one of the top quarterback recruits in the country, fielding scholarship offers from Alabama, Purdue, Miami and Michigan State and a host of others. Initially Marve committed to the Crimson Tide, but after Mike Shula's firing, he reopened his recruitment and ended up signing with Miami.

Less than six months later, Marve was a passenger in a car driven by one of his Miami teammates. The car slammed into a guardrail on I-95 after the driver fell asleep, and Marve's left hand was badly injured, leading him to redshirt his freshman season. This past season, Marve returned to start 11 games for the Hurricanes, throwing for nine touchdowns and 13 interceptions. But in December he decided to transfer. Which leads to an interesting question, how often have college football quarterbacks transferred and actually been successful at their new destination?

Initially, Miami announced that Marve would not be granted his release to transfer to any SEC, ACC, or Florida colleges. After a hearing, those restrictions were amended to include, from the SEC, only LSU, Tennessee, and Florida, schools that Miami believed improperly tampered with their player. Marve withdrew from school for the spring semester in order to make a decision, now the Tampa Tribune is reporting that Marve plans to walk on at Tennessee. Why walk on? Because unless Miami releases him he can't accept a scholarship to Tennessee.

While paying tuition at Tennessee rather than accepting a scholarship from Purdue, South Florida, Nebraska, or Arizona State (the other schools Marve visited) might not make financial sense, it makes an awful lot of football sense. The quarterback depth chart at Tennessee features just two scholarship quarterbacks, senior Jonathan Crompton and junior Nick Stephens. Having three years between quarterbacks is virtually unheard of at a major college program, and Lane Kiffin has hit the recruiting trail attempting to turn this lack of depth into a major selling point for potential signal callers.

If Marve were to enroll at Tennessee, he'd be eligible beginning with the 2010 season (with an additional year after that) and would find himself competing with only Stephens, whichever freshmen Tennessee might sign in the class of 2010, and former pro baseball player Mike Rozier for the starting job. As far as major programs go, those odds are pretty golden. Not surprisingly, when reached for comment by FanHouse Tennessee officials were mum on the potential transfer, but it appears that Marve's decision has come down to Purdue and the Vols.

Will Marve turn down a scholarship at a Big Ten school to pay to play at an SEC school? The decision could come as soon as Friday. In the meantime, it's important to keep in mind that the Marve family isn't exactly struggling for cash. His father, Eugene Marve, played 12 years in the NFL. And, in a key move, Marve has already spent a semester out of school since leaving Miami. So the Marve family would actually only have to pay for one semester of tuition, the fall of 2009, before the one-year scholarship limitation runs out that is keeping Marve from transferring to any school of his choice.



I can think of a couple of other examples of players who have transferred to schools they weren't released to and gamed the system like this. Brent Schaeffer, who started for the Vols as a freshman in 2004, did it. Tennessee refused to grant him a release to transfer in conference, as is typical, but Schaeffer played for a year in junior college and then enrolled at Ole Miss with two years of eligibility remaining.

Marve could have also done what Luke Recker did, and transfered out of the conference for a semester only to transfer back in, though the circumstances of Recker's return might've had more to do with personal circumstances than gaming the system. Still, Recker left Indiana, transferred to Arizona for a semester, and then transferred from there to Iowa without playing a game for the Wildcats.

The point is that Marve and his family will probably only have to pay for one semester of tuition at Tennessee, which isn't the huge barrier that some have made it out to be given the relatively limited cost of attending Tennessee and his family's financial status.

But here's the real question. For all the attention paid to Marve's transfer, how many quarterbacks transferred from one big school to another big school and won a conference championship? Troy Aikman led UCLA to a share of the Pac-10 title in 1987 after transferring from Oklahoma and Colt Brennan left Colorado to lead Hawaii all the way to the Sugar Bowl in 2007-08, though Hawaii isn't a BCS-level school. Surely there are others, but my point is a quarterback leaving and finding success in different college football pastures is pretty rare.

But maybe all the Marve transfer frenzy isn't so much about winning the SEC as much as it is a sign of how desperate every single one of us is for college football season to return. In the meantime, Marve is on the clock.