In the early afternoon of Tuesday, June 23, the NCAA announced that its Division I Cabinet had voted unanimously to approve a new age-based eligibility model.
The essence: coming in the fall of 2027, athletes will get five years to play five seasons with only a narrow range of exceptions. Division I athletes get up to five years of eligibility if they enroll in college no later than the academic year after their 19th birthday. And there will be no more redshirt years.
Within 10 minutes — maybe it was 10 seconds — attorney Darren Heitner was telling national media to get ready for lawsuits.
College basketball reporter Jon Rothstein wrote, “Attorney Darren Heitner — who’s working in unison with fellow attorney Ryan Downton — tells me that the duo now has 55 college basketball players from the HS Class of 2022 who will be filing lawsuits in at least five states after today’s NCAA rule change.”
As part of the new way of doing business, athletes who completed their fourth year of eligibility by the spring of 2026 don’t get that fifth year. Presumably, that’s what this round of lawsuits will be about.
The age-based eligibility model — commonly known as 5 for 5 — has always been a solution in search of a problem. No matter how many petitions for extra eligibility the NCAA is asked to review each year, it represents the tiniest fraction of NCAA athletes, far, far fewer than 1%. Not nearly enough for a sea change.
But everyone got behind the 5-for-5 push — “No more redshirts! No more waivers!” — and so now college athletics will meander off in another direction with unintended consequences. School and NCAA records long held by those who played four seasons will now be obliterated by the wave of the 5-for-5s.
Goes to show the power of social media. Or the absurdity of social media. Let a journeyman quarterback such as Alan Bowman be granted a seventh year of eligibility — an absolutely correct ruling, given that he perfectly fit criteria for a redshirt year, a COVID-bonus season and a medical hardship for a year lost to injury — and paroxysms of outrage set in among a legion of dimwits. This is nuts! College sports has to do something! Guys like this are taking roster spots from 18-year-olds!
I can’t help but think social media’s elevating isolated cases such as that one is a contributing factor in the age-based eligibility model being greenlighted.
By the way: the number of college football programs keeps growing, more teams every year than there was the year before. If Alan Bowman was dashing some teenager’s dream by sticking around for that last year at Oklahoma State, that kid could have gone to Oklahoma Panhandle State — and actually played!
Remember when the first wave of Dick Vitale’s diaper dandies began leaving college basketball early for the NBA? It happened often enough, we had a term for that: one and done. Paroxysms of outrage set in among the legions: This is nuts! The NCAA and the NBA have to do something! These dang kids ditching school are ruining college sports!
Back then, a lot of people wanted those kids to be compelled to stay in school for four years. Now that kids want to stay in school for four or five years — we have financial incentives for that — and work the angles for more, folks don’t like that either.
I remember, too, when the people in charge of college athletics at least pretended to care more about their athletes’ academic wellbeing. That was a big reason for redshirting players in the first place.
Before 2018, redshirting meant sitting out a full year. No four-game window for football players to break the ice without losing a year of eligibility. The thinking was, give a freshman athlete a full year without the stress of preparing for a game and he or she would have a chance to get familiar with the campus, the classroom requirements, establish a solid foundation academically, socially, athletically.
So much for the best intentions.
A prominent Texas Tech football player once told me he enrolled initially fully intent on studying architecture but realized in a hurry that the demands of football and the demands of studying architecture forced a choice. Guess which route he chose. (That player did OK. Now he’s a college football coach, making more than the guy who drew up plans for your house).
Oh, I’m not sympathetic to those failed pro basketball players who want to come back to college. Turn pro and there should be no turning back. Curbing the aspirations of those guys, though, will come at a cost. Texas Tech once had a player, offensive lineman Tony Morales, who missed his first four seasons because of injuries.
Up to now, there was a remedy for that. Morales, having missed 2011-14, got to play in 2015-17. Now, he’d be out of luck.
By adopting age-based eligibility, those involved are signaling that it’d just take too much time and trouble to do the right thing.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Think 5 for 5 will make everyone happy? Think again | Opinion
Reporting by Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
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By Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal | USA TODAY Network
