Picture this, in today’s age of player empowerment: A college basketball player sees his playing time decrease during his redshirt junior season. He earns his undergraduate degree — the main goal of anyone’s secondary education, of course — and decides, rather than riding the pine during what could be his last year of competitive basketball, he will look for another option elsewhere.

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He is a graduate transfer who has played three seasons of basketball in four years. He is in good academic standing — he will even earn the team’s academic excellence honor during his redshirt sophomore season — and he has found a welcoming university in another part of the country, a place that offers a graduate program that piques his intellectual interest.

Sign, seal, deliver, right?

Not so fast.

It has been more than eight years since Todd O’Brien fell victim to the worst that NCAA legislation has to offer, a combination of organizational red tape and a control-freak coach costing him his final year of athletic eligibility. He began his career at Bucknell in 2007, making the Patriot League’s all-rookie team before transferring to Saint Joseph’s in Philadelphia. He sat out the following season before starting at center for the Hawks in 2009-10, leading the team in rebounds. His playing time decreased the next year, after St. Joe’s brought in what was by far the highest-rated recruiting class (43rd nationally) of coach Phil Martelli’s tenure.

With one year of eligibility remaining, and with his economics degree in hand by summer’s end, O’Brien opted to become a graduate transfer for the 2011-12 season, picking UAB. Except Martelli refused to endorse a waiver that would have granted O’Brien — again, by that point, a St. Joe’s graduate — eligibility to take the floor in his final college season.

So O’Brien — who says he never signed his scholarship papers at St. Joe’s for 2011-12 — spent his last season essentially redshirting in Birmingham, Ala. And there was nothing he could do about it.

“Nobody won,” O’Brien said by phone last week in Egypt. “It wasn’t a good look for the school. It wasn’t a good look for me. It was kind of just unnecessary. But what can you do?”

O’Brien, for his part, is well over it. He has no interest in re-litigating past wounds, choosing instead to reflect fondly on his time at St. Joe’s and on all of the friends he made while there. (He says he has not spoken with Martelli, who is now an assistant at Michigan, since then.) O’Brien made the most of his situation at UAB, working out and practicing with his teammates for a year before embarking on a professional career that has taken him to 11 teams in seven countries, where he has regularly posted double-figure averages in points and rebounds. He also made a name for himself stateside in the summer as part of Overseas Elite, the team that took home the trophy (and the $1-2 million a year in prize money) in four consecutive years in The Basketball Tournament, which is broadcast on ESPN.

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Last month, an NCAA working group announced it would explore a concept allowing all athletes to transfer and play immediately one time during their college careers. O’Brien hasn’t paid a whole lot of attention to all of the looming NCAA reform, but he is happy to see the public sentiment generally shift over the years to more of a pro-athlete environment.

“I mean, to me, they should be able to just transfer — the same way coaches just come and go, they just go to the highest-paying job or the situation they prefer, I don’t really see why athletes can’t as well,” O’Brien said of his ideal view of how transfer rules should work. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a blessing to get your college paid for, your board and everything, and I understand the worry that: What if all the good players transfer to one school? I get that. So if anything, put a limit on the number of incoming transfers per year a university can take, or something like that.

“Because I do understand when people say: ‘What if five of the best players who aren’t going to the draft and are coming back to college all decide to transfer to the same school?’ But that doesn’t always work out, either. You see it in the NBA when they put together ‘dream teams’ and it doesn’t always shake out on the court. I just think the kids are making money for the schools, you know what I mean? March Madness makes so much money, so they should be able to just go where they want to go. If the school’s willing to give them a scholarship, they should be allowed to go play there.”

That is what the NCAA’s working group concept is essentially proposing, although the school that the player is departing will have to sign off on the player’s ability to be immediately eligible elsewhere. The PR backlash if a coach refused to approve eligibility would likely be too much for an aggrieved school to overcome, but O’Brien learned first-hand that public outcry, at least back then, meant little when his career was on the line.

O’Brien, who was making his second transfer, said he called up NCAA headquarters before deciding to leave St. Joe’s back in 2011, presenting his situation to a rep on the phone who, he says, told him he was in the clear to transfer and be eligible immediately.

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He picked UAB for his fifth year so that he could start his master’s in public administration with a focus in real estate development. He says he completed six of his 11 credits and has maxed out his online classes, so he will have to eventually finish the coursework in person, something he plans to do whenever he is actually in the U.S. for more than three months at a time.

“At the time people were like: ‘It’s B.S. Blah, blah, blah,’” O’Brien said of his academically inclined decision to pick UAB. “But no, I have 12 apartments back home that I own and manage with a partner. It’s not like I was bluffing about that. It’s actually a field that I pursued.”

He hired a lawyer, Don Jackson, only once things started to get messy. He even offered to pay St. Joe’s back for the summer courses he had taken to complete his undergraduate degree. But St. Joe’s still had to sign off on O’Brien’s eligibility, and Martelli refused to do so.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years almost, so I’ve been involved in quite a number of very contentious cases,” Jackson said. “But that was the one case, I mean, the system just failed. The system failed this young man. And he may not be angry with Saint Joseph’s, but I will be frank with you: I still have a problem with the way that they handled this, because they used a flaw in the system to destroy a young man’s career.”

Jackson represented basketball players in two similar cases in the ensuing years, helping Daisha Simmons gain eligibility at Seton Hall after leaving Alabama in 2014 and helping Cleveland “Pancake” Thomas get eligible at Western Kentucky after leaving Hartford in 2016.

Like O’Brien, both were graduate transfers. And like O’Brien, both were making their second transfers, as Simmons had begun her career at Rutgers and Thomas had started his career at New Mexico. The current working group’s proposed concepts apply to first-time transfers, so cases like those three players’ situations would be unaffected by new legislation.

“The position that Saint Joseph’s took, candidly, I thought was one of the most mean-spirited, calculated and intentional acts that I’ve ever seen a university engage in to damage a student-athlete’s career,” said Jackson, who is based in Montgomery, Ala.

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The tenor around such issues has changed drastically since O’Brien found himself at the center of a national debate. The uproar today would be deafening. And yet, for all the talk of player progress, both real and imagined, a situation like O’Brien’s could still technically happen in 2020.

“I’ll tell you: I still see coaches act that way,” Jackson said, “just not on that particular issue.”

(Photo: Chris Chambers / Getty Images)