Shot:
Chaser:
From Wetzel:
By not controlling who is or isn’t eligible to play, the NCAA is quickly losing the ability to function as an organizing athletic body. This is far more important than, say, NIL compensation, where well-meaning arguments on all sides exist. This is basic stuff.
You can’t play U8 soccer if you’re 10. You can’t be on a city team in the Little League World Series if your players hail from three states over. You can’t play high school sports if you already graduated. You can’t get drafted into the NFL until three years after high school.
This is no longer about establishing guardrails for college sports. It’s about having an actual road on which to establish the guardrails.
The trend is to get a local judge to offer an injunction that allows a player eligibility, even in violation of clear NCAA rules. The player then competes through the season before dropping the case before it’s even heard.
If that holds, then college football in August will be about grabbing any player with even the slightest argument for eligibility who just got cut from NFL training camps.
Come make seven figures in college ball rather than sit on a practice squad … where maxed-out pay for rookies is $235,000 a year. Come play for us until injuries force an NFL team to bring someone in.
A constantly revolving door between NCAA rosters and the pros, with college coaches mining the NFL waiver wire, sounds far-fetched. A guy playing G League ball one Saturday and SEC ball the next once sounded crazy, too, until Alabama’s Charles Bediako made it a reality last month.
Yes, Stetson Bennett was in college for…a while. So I realize the irony in bitching about this. However, Stetson entered in 2017 (two years before Aguilar, who is looking play again three years after Bennett’s departure), redshirted and played the practice squad at Georgia, headed to JUCO at Jones College for one year, and came back and played four years off the redshirt. Then, the one year of junior college didn’t count against your five year window correction: Bennett got a COVID year exemption. Now, they NCAA loosened it in the famed Pavia Rule to two years of JUCO.
Now, it seems like the NCAA is backed into a corner. And one of your biggest cash cows is pushing you hard into it:
Greg Sankey taking a stand? Say it ain’t so!
Stet’s JUCO year counted. His 2020 season didn’t. Nobody’s 2020 season counted in college football.
This is correct. His years of eligibility were 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 with 17 being a redshirt.
So you’re saying Stet can come back for another year 😉
When Sankey finally takes a stand against bama it’s time to give it up. Is there no Tony Barnhart voice of the obvious article to support Greg.
I’m surprised Sankey finally nutted up, but frankly I don’t give him much credit since he waited pretty much until his heels were on the end of the plank before finally doing something. They really should make an example of Bama once the TRO is lifted for pulling this BS.
And to everyone saying “they want to see Chambless play because he’s so amazing”, yeah, its because he’s playing (in many cases) against guys who are 4-6 years younger than him. Who wants to see that. Moderately surprised the NCAA has pushed back on his “(undocumented) debilitating medical condition that he first told everyone about 3 years after the fact” defense…..
Totally agree well said.
Joey Aguilar has his injunction hearing next Friday the 13th? How many years would he have if he wins?
I assume he is only asking for 1, but why not go ahead and ask for them all!
grandstanding but the judge will be granting the TRO.
Kirby will have a plan for both those QBs
There is a really easy solution to all this BS. Either the conference or NCAA can simply rule the team ineligible for postseason play that allows a player to play after his eligibility is up. Teams will stop doing this immediately.
These TROs are telling all involved that they can’t penalize the university for compliance with the order.
What Tennessee and others should be doing is saying, “You can get your TRO, but you aren’t going to play.” The program and the sport are bigger than one person.
Hahahahaha! Who am I kidding? These coaches and administrators don’t give a damn.
I think they have the TROs because there’s no rule in place yet that I’m recommending. Since the schools are the conference and NCAA, they can all decide this isn’t ok and make the rules. The rule doesn’t govern the kids, just the schools, so little risk of a lawsuit.
The TRO only applies while it is in effect. If it is set aside (as it should be), there is nothing to prevent the SEC or NCAA from coming down hard on Bama afterward for using him – a TRO is not a “get out of jail forever” card….
This will definitely be cliff time. The consequences will have an effect down to high schoolers . Sankey sold us out long ago and being fed and led by that crowd from big? and shorthorns! Kirby has and will continue to kick their asses! Hate everybody but us!!! Go Dawgs!!!
Sankey did the right thing here. He lays out the reasoning for the eligibility rules. The question is whether a judge in Knoxville, Tuscaloosa or Oxford goes for it.
Lose this? Lose college sports.
I’m glad Stet and Kirby got ours while it was still somewhat college football.
There’s a part of me that wishes they would just fuck it up so badly that I can quit wasting time on it. I’ll miss the good old days, but I’ll also be much more productive on fall Saturdays.
I want college sports. I do think it’s a part of American culture. I do think it’s a part of the college experience. What this is becoming is unrecognizable.
If these actions continue to tear down the eligibility rules, some schools are going to have to step out and hit the reset button. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I’m guessing Georgia is going to be one of the schools.
Stet really should have done the work to get his degree. It is absurd that he didn’t.
Making millions of dollars in college instead of pennies as a professional is a new development and explains the legal eagle mambo we’re seeing. Its upside down and backwards but the players (and their agents) have seen there is a vacuum and opportunity in this space and are taking advantage. To me its more evidence that the USA (if it ever was) has strayed from being a ruled-based type society in pretty much all walks of society also known as “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’ “.
COVID (and the events surrounding it) broke us in so many ways….. Highlighted vividly that all of us have (1) rules that we think others should follow and should be enforced by the state (violence) and (2) rules that we should be exempted from and/or are illegitimate. That tension is of course inherent in human nature, but COVID really broke the issue starkly to the polity, and we have been unable to re-coalesce around (1) what rules are reasonable and legitimate to a sufficient majority and (2) what are the consequences for violating those rules – sadly I think it is going to take a long, long time for us to get there….
Why can’t the NCAA hire decent lawyers? Paraphrasing…“Integral to student athletes competing in college sports” is the amateurism argument they already lost. And can’t baseball players sign minor league contracts and still play college ball? The better argument is an organizations right to establish eligibility rules that don’t violate or discriminate against a protected class. The kids are arguing anti-trust. The former should be an obvious winner in court…for now anyway…and the latter really does need to be litigated and cause Congress to act or have SCOTUS put an end to this nonsense. “It’s for the children, we’ll keep the money” already got shot down and opened this Pandora’s Box.
Slightly off topic here. I see and hear a lot of chatter about athletes no longer needing to be enrolled or attending class. Is this true? It’s been a long time since I saw anything about satisfactory academic progress.
They generally take online classes. Not too hard to pass those.
Can’t remember the last time academic eligibility was brought up. Excellent point and on topic.
Suddenly had a vision of John Cleese hosting the Monty Python class on how to maintain college football academic eligibility in 2026. Lesson 1 academic concerns are as dead as this parrot 🦜 Totally bereft of life.
What’s the problem with letting kids who aren’t good enough for the NFL play an extra year, at least in the short term with all the upheaval in the sport? For a player like Chambliss who spent his entire career at the D-II level before transferring to Ole Miss to be a backup, that one year could be life changing. I don’t really see too much of a downside.
Because it will never stop. That’s why.
I’ve been a fan of 5 years to play 5.
Once they get actual guidelines narrowed down it would stop. They’re already stopping it currently.