Yes, for 5 very good reasons. 1) Evina is WNBA draft eligible at the end of this coming season. If she has to sit a year she will be able to go straight to the WNBA without playing anymore WCBB. 2) UCONN has two very talented guards coming in 2020 which would make for a very crowded backcourt with Evina. 3) The biggest hurdle might be TN supporting the waiver request. TN finds itself in a position of needing to play UCONN to get back to respectability. Lack of TN support for the waiver would put the continuation of the TN-UCONN series in jeopardy=bigger loss for TN. 4) Most important, got to believe that Geno and the staff factored in all of the above into the decision to accept Evina in the first place & likely placed a call to TN to get a feeling of which way they were leaning.
5) As
@UConnCat keeps pointing out- what goes around comes around. TN might one day find itself in need of immediately eligible impact players. I can't prove this but it appears that UCONN has or is about to support every request for immediate eligibility for players that have transferred out under this new guideline which would include (AEH, Lexi Gordon, and Mikayla Coombs).
Lastly, The NCAA approved 77% of waiver WCBB request for immediate eligibility last year and implemented new guidance for those request in April 2018. Among the new guidance is the one that has already been mentioned which is the old school MUST support the waiver request. Another, perhaps more important, consideration is the phrase "due to circumstances beyond the control of the player". I'm not a lawyer but I would argue that a coaching change is a "circumstance" well beyond the control of any player. I suspect that any waiver request for which there was a coaching change this year will get approved under this new guideline-but.... this is the NCAA.
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