JUCO players will have 4 years NCAA eligibility remaining

[gangrene]

Newest NCAA ruling to have significant impact for JUCO athletes

What Pavia’s Win Means (And Doesn’t) For The NCAA And JUCO Transfers

Diego Pavia court ruling another potentially massive blow for NCAA — 'It's not going to end until we collectively bargain'

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the implications this will have on recruiting and then how that will translate for us.

[Mean Green 93-98]

This is insane.  So seasons played at a JUCO don't affect eligibility at all?

What this does is give a huge recruiting advantage to JUCOs over FCS schools and lower, and potentially over G5s.  A player thinks he has P2 ability but isn't getting P2 offers?  Commit to a JUCO, give yourself 2 years to develop and show what you can do in college ball, then still have just as many years of eligibility to offer as a high school commit would have.

We are going to see more of these 24- and 25-year-old college football players going forward.

Once again, note who is ruining college football....It's not the NCAA, it's the court system and government (okay, along with ESPN).

Edited yesterday at 04:05 AM by Mean Green 93-98

[NT80]

14 minutes ago, Mean Green 93-98 said:

We are going to see more of these 24- and 25-year-old college football players going forward.

BYU has always had a lot of older athletes because of their mission service.   I absolutely believe it helps their athletic programs.

Many head coaches want older players on their roster.  Not just because of experience, but maturity and more adaptable sometimes than younger players.  

Men vs boys.

[meaniegreenie]

Then don't allow any credits to be transferred either.

[Tom McKrackin]

I don’t think this will necessarily help jucos. There will always be a stigma with having attended a juco for most.

[NorthTexan95]

We're on our way to college football being a career.  Time to work on the CSARF ... College Student Athlete Retirement Fund.  (Gotta have "Student" in the name to continue the falsehood). 

[MeanGreenZen]

This is a horrible ruling as we are on our way to having career minor league football players sponsored by colleges. 

It also means that North Texas and all other colleges will benefit from more developed talent. 

Hurts high school kids who want to go to 4-year institutions the most. Why recruit a HS kid when you can get a player who is two years more developed? 

It has been established in court that the NCAA cannot establish any sort of eligibility rules. Can the individual conferences band together and put forward some sort of eligibility guidelines and/or transfer portal restrictions that makes sense? 

[MeanGreenZen]

Also wonder how this impacts a kid like Tylor Perry, whose eligibility JUST ran out before this season because of JUCO time served.
I guarantee guys like him have probably already filed lawsuits asking to be granted immediate eligibility and reinstatement. 

[meangreenfaninno]

22 minutes ago, MeanGreenZen said:

Also wonder how this impacts a kid like Tylor Perry, whose eligibility JUST ran out before this season because of JUCO time served.
I guarantee guys like him have probably already filed lawsuits asking to be granted immediate eligibility and reinstatement. 

Great point.  

[Wag Tag]

College football could become a career especially when you look at salaries for QB's. Basically the Michigan qb could retire after four years. So we are going to see more 24 and 25 year olds in college sports? Does this hurt the NFL?

Edited yesterday at 02:54 PM by Wag Tag

[TheColonyEagle]

On the surface, this seems bad for HS grads. Really good for P4s. 

If you are a HS senior, your chances of playing D1...baseball especially, out of HS is severely diminished. A D1 baseball coach has way better options now than taking a chance on a HS kid. The whole model has changed and it effects all sports. Think about football. The days of recruiting a kid and developing him are over. Saw in another thread about our incoming QB from Miami. Someone asked (and it's a good question): "if he was the back up, the Heisman candidate starter just left. Isn't it his job? Why would he leave?" Because that coach doesn't care about him. He's scouring the transfer portal looking for his next Cam Ward. (just like he did with the real Cam Ward). Chances are the Miami staff is looking for a bigger, better deal. If you're a D1 baseball or basketball coach, the talent pool of 21 year old, developed, experienced players just opened up. HS kids are going to get pushed out. The transfer portal is going to get crazier to. College players are going to be used, moved, basically traded...

With NIL, players are going to stay in college longer too. Saw something the other day: Every SEC starting QB makes more $$ than Brock Purdy, a Superbowl starting 3rd year NFL QB.

 

[El Paso Eagle]

13 hours ago, MeanGreenZen said:

Also wonder how this impacts a kid like Tylor Perry, whose eligibility JUST ran out before this season because of JUCO time served.
I guarantee guys like him have probably already filed lawsuits asking to be granted immediate eligibility and reinstatement. 

I had heard one opinion that players whose eligibility ran out and are no longer in schools could have a recourse to try to regain some eligibility. This is freaking ridiculous.

Edited 14 hours ago by El Paso Eagle

[El Paso Eagle]

3 hours ago, MeanGreenZen said:

Hurts high school kids who want to go to 4-year institutions the most. Why recruit a HS kid when you can get a player who is two years more developed? 

Not trying to sound like too much of an ass, but I'm starting not to care how it impacts high school kids. Many of these are the same kids that you will give a chance to, and then they have a good season after one or two years and leave. So, if rightly so, they are looking after what is best for them, the Universities should be looking out for what's best for them and recruit players who are most ready to step on the field and help them play. 

PS also has an issue with some of these high school coaches who complain that colleges are not recruiting their kids as much but don't seem to want to bring up the fact that those same kids if they're given the opportunity, will leave a smaller school without hesitation if something better comes along for them.

Edited yesterday at 05:53 PM by El Paso Eagle

[meaniegreenie]

3 hours ago, MeanGreenZen said:

This is a horrible ruling as we are on our way to having career minor league football players sponsored by colleges. 

It also means that North Texas and all other colleges will benefit from more developed talent. 

Hurts high school kids who want to go to 4-year institutions the most. Why recruit a HS kid when you can get a player who is two years more developed? 

It has been established in court that the NCAA cannot establish any sort of eligibility rules. Can the individual conferences band together and put forward some sort of eligibility guidelines and/or transfer portal restrictions that makes sense? 

That sums up my whole feeling regarding where we're heading. 

I don't want Universities being in the business of minor league sports, fast food chains, discount store franchises, or Medicare Advantage Plan sales (we've got enough of those already this time of year!).

[meaniegreenie]

 

3 hours ago, Wag Tag said:

College football could become a career especially when you look at salaries for QB's.

It's going to be interesting to see how the taxpayers see this (for state schools, N/A for private).

Similar to the concerns regarding spending local tax $'s to build NFL stadiums, using tax dollars to run a minor league FB team may stir some controversy. 

I may be wrong since I don't keep up with all of the latest media payouts, etc, but I think there's not a lot of schools that actually make money on athletics (and this is BEFORE we start paying them directly).
https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/Finances/2023RES_DI-RevExpReport_FINAL.pdf

If UT essentially starts running a minor league FB team out of the school and makes money, should the tax payers expect a refund or cut in taxes directed to UT?  What if they're losing money?

[untjim1995]

15 minutes ago, meaniegreenie said:

 

It's going to be interesting to see how the taxpayers see this (for state schools, N/A for private).

Similar to the concerns regarding spending local tax $'s to build NFL stadiums, using tax dollars to run a minor league FB team may stir some controversy. 

I may be wrong since I don't keep up with all of the latest media payouts, etc, but I think there's not a lot of schools that actually make money on athletics (and this is BEFORE we start paying them directly).
https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/Finances/2023RES_DI-RevExpReport_FINAL.pdf

If UT essentially starts running a minor league FB team out of the school and makes money, should the tax payers expect a refund or cut in taxes directed to UT?  What if they're losing money?

The UT Athletic Department will just get treated as a corporation, saying funds received to it are voluntary, even if tax-deductible. And no politician will touch this, knowing how quickly they'd get hammered for hurting State U's football team and its funding.

[Meangreen Fight]

21 hours ago, Mean Green 93-98 said:

Once again, note who is ruining college football....It's not the NCAA, it's the court system and government (okay, along with ESPN).

I don't see it that way.  The system was built on "amateurism" and academics.  The college football cadre abandoned that and the courts are trying to sort out the mess.  ESPN (and other media distributers) are just buying and promoting to resale of the product.  Hopefully the JUCO guys are mature enough to actually value the education they will get access when they get to FBS.  I do agree it is being ruined but ultimately it isn't the government.  The fall of the College Football Alliance gave the revenue sports programs to operate as independent capitalist organizations selling to the highest bidder.  I think I go review that case and read what the defenders of the College Football Alliance and share in another topic.

Edited 16 hours ago by Meangreen Fight

[Meangreen Fight]

11 hours ago, MeanGreenZen said:

It has been established in court that the NCAA cannot establish any sort of eligibility rules. Can the individual conferences band together and put forward some sort of eligibility guidelines and/or transfer portal restrictions that makes sense? 

Nope from the beginning of this (end of College Football Alliance).  It has all been about cut throat capitalism with the schools competing as individual business that happen to operate sports teams connected to academic institutions.  Come on, you have Cal and Stanford in the Atlantic Coast Conference.  The NFL stopped that madness as soon as they added franchises in geographic locations to fix that mess (Carolina Panthers, Arizona Cardinals).  College Football in comparison is going backwards.  Imagine if the Los Angeles Rams and 49ers were moved to the NFC East because they were big markets like New York. 🤣.  The same reason that NIL is a mess; not paying players will always be more profitable if your organization doesn't have to pay them directly and they aren't employees with rights and access to collective bargaining (Look up stories on the problems with the Gig Economy ie Uber, Grubhub and etc.) They should roll everything back to being in line with salaries for everyone in College Athletics being on par with academic administrators, professors and the players as amateurs getting scholarships and regional conferences.  But we all know that all those people will not agree to take massive pay cuts (excluding the athletes because you don't need them to agree because the structure would be self evident the teams are not operating as if they are seeking profit).  In this every conference/program for themselves model nobody has the desire or power to fix things on a macro level.  And any entity that does will immediately be sued or have to allow for some sort of collective bargaining. 🤷🏽‍♂️

[GMG_Dallas]

It's going to take the biggest/wealthiest schools' donors to make a stand. I wonder if the new JUCO ruling will spark some of that resistance. We keep distancing ourselves from what college sports was 5 years ago. Will watching a bunch of 27 year old athletes pretending to be college students change things? I know there's a few "older" players out there but do Alabama boosters what to watch 2 deep full of literal grown men? I also wonder what will happen to the NFL with all this. I can't imagine NFL teams will want to draft too many older players. Drafting a 28 year old QB and 28 year old OL or RB are very different when looking at wear on the body.

For comedic relief (your favorite school makes an appearance):

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14im364Ecy/

[TIgreen01]

1 hour ago, GMG_Dallas said:

It's going to take the biggest/wealthiest schools' donors to make a stand. I wonder if the new JUCO ruling will spark some of that resistance. We keep distancing ourselves from what college sports was 5 years ago. Will watching a bunch of 27 year old athletes pretending to be college students change things? I know there's a few "older" players out there but do Alabama boosters what to watch 2 deep full of literal grown men? I also wonder what will happen to the NFL with all this. I can't imagine NFL teams will want to draft too many older players. Drafting a 28 year old QB and 28 year old OL or RB are very different when looking at wear on the body.

For comedic relief (your favorite school makes an appearance):

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14im364Ecy/

Thinking along those same lines…does the NFL eligibility state three years since 18th birthday?  Or three years playing some form of post high school football?  I don’t think this will have as much of an impact as feared for the reason that most of the time, college coaches want guys in their system more than a year at a time.

[Meangreen Fight]

1 hour ago, GMG_Dallas said:

It's going to take the biggest/wealthiest schools' donors to make a stand. I wonder if the new JUCO ruling will spark some of that resistance. We keep distancing ourselves from what college sports was 5 years ago. Will watching a bunch of 27 year old athletes pretending to be college students change things? I know there's a few "older" players out there but do Alabama boosters what to watch 2 deep full of literal grown men? I also wonder what will happen to the NFL with all this. I can't imagine NFL teams will want to draft too many older players. Drafting a 28 year old QB and 28 year old OL or RB are very different when looking at wear on the body.

For comedic relief (your favorite school makes an appearance):

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14im364Ecy/

Take a stand? 🤣 They won't and they don't care who are in the uniforms they love as long as they can play and aren't embarrassing the program in their free time.   The 27 year olds in FBS not playing QB will be the rarity.  Maybe the over 23 year olds playing the more physically taxing positions we stay put their final 2-3 years prioritizing education over chasing a very short improbable NFL careers. 🤷🏽‍♂️

[GMG_Dallas]

1 hour ago, TIgreen01 said:

Thinking along those same lines…does the NFL eligibility state three years since 18th birthday?  Or three years playing some form of post high school football?  I don’t think this will have as much of an impact as feared for the reason that most of the time, college coaches want guys in their system more than a year at a time.

I agree overall. Was just thinking out loud. If I'm a P4 school and there's still scholarship limits, I'd probably rather take the high school freak athlete. Now, maybe I could give the other guy an NIL deal to pay for school as a PWO but how many of those guys would be scholarship worthy talents.

7 minutes ago, Meangreen Fight said:

Take a stand? 🤣 They won't and they don't care who are in the uniforms they love as long as they can play and aren't embarrassing the program in their free time.   The 27 year olds in FBS not playing QB will be the rarity.  Maybe the over 23 year olds playing the more physically taxing positions we stay put their final 2-3 years prioritizing education over chasing a very short improbable NFL careers. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Don't know why you think it's so improbable. Look at a guy like Phil Knight and Oregon. He could buy a couple pro teams if he wanted to pay 27 year olds to play ball and get bragging rights. The more we remove ourselves from college sports, I think it's reasonable to wonder if guys like him lose interest. Not saying we're there yet. Just saying it's not impossible...

[El Paso Eagle]

I think having juco eligibility not count will be a bigger impact to FCS and division 2 schools that it will to G5 schools. I am more interested in seeing the impact with the NCAA considering reducing the number of players on a team from 120 to between 85-95. This might open up more opportunities at G5 schools for players who turn down scholarships at G5s to walk on a power programs. At the end of the day I hope something changes because having over half the programs in FBS basically turning over their rosters every year or so along with the top talent from FCS and D2 being pulled away is not good for the game of football. I'm just ready for the SEC and Big ten and maybe a few others to break off and then try to somehow re-engineer college football.

[meaniegreenie]

5 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

It's going to take the biggest/wealthiest schools' donors to make a stand. I wonder if the new JUCO ruling will spark some of that resistance. We keep distancing ourselves from what college sports was 5 years ago. Will watching a bunch of 27 year old athletes pretending to be college students change things? I know there's a few "older" players out there but do Alabama boosters what to watch 2 deep full of literal grown men? I also wonder what will happen to the NFL with all this. I can't imagine NFL teams will want to draft too many older players. Drafting a 28 year old QB and 28 year old OL or RB are very different when looking at wear on the body.

For comedic relief (your favorite school makes an appearance):

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14im364Ecy/

I think in your scenario part of what will happen is that the players will end up splitting into two groups: those that are minor league FB players destined for the NFL (short CFB term) and those that treat it as a full time job (longer CFB term).  To your point, the NFL will be grabbing the best players when they are younger.  Those that don't make the NFL will be the ones that remain in college.

This will get more interesting once the players get turned into "employees", which is likely just a matter of time.  When this happens, there will initially be restrictions on the employment, but like everything else, lawsuits will force changes, eventually making the players normal employees of the university.

This will be followed by the legal challenge to get unlimited eligibility because it will be claimed that you can't fire an employee after 2 years, simply for hitting a "term limit".  So, you say make them "contract" employees.  That will have it's own set of problems. 

The next challenge will be to remove total "player" limits since these are just employees.  Just as you can't limit how many janitors, professors, or secretaries a school can hire, you can't limit the number of hired "players".
While it will likely be possible to limit the number of "active players" for a game, the hiring limit will have to be removed.  While pro teams do have roster limits, that is purely self imposed by the league.  The schools aren't going to do it  (likely not legally allowed either) and the powerless NCAA will be able to do nothing about it.

So, eventually, you have a system where schools can hire as many players as they want and keep them as long as they want. 

People can scoff at this, but the whole system is going to be driven by court decisions as this continues down the slippery slope that almost everybody predicted.  It's why I smh at people that simply say "make them employees".  As usual, they usually haven't considered either of the two issues I mentioned and I'm sure there are many other issues to address as well.   HR is gonna' LOVE dealing with all of this!

Now, where do HS players fit into this whole situation?  As others have mentioned, this is really going to affect them and it's vary as the timeline moves along through the court challenges, resulting in the various changes. It will likely take at least a decade or more to get most of them resolved.

I'm really not sure what's going to happen, but, as usual, the greatest HS players will be treated differently than the average and differently again for the "walkons".

Until the system settles into some version addressing the two issues I described above (and many others), it will depend on the order in which the various changes are challenged/accepted/rejected by the courts. 

Given just the two I mentioned, you can make your own determination as to what will happen to the various HS students AND the existing players, some of which could be at a location for many years. We'll start in stage #1 and progress to stage #4, but stages #2,#3 could happen in the any order.

1. YES eligibility limitations; YES hiring limits: TBD
2. YES eligibility limitations; NO hiring limits: TBD 
3. NO eligibility limitations; YES hiring limits: TBD
4. NO eligibility limitations; NO hiring limits: BIG$$ university can simply buy up all of the HS players that are willing to sit on the bench for big money? (similar to no salary cap in pros).

As mentioned earlier, I can only imagine the "fun" this is going to bring to HR (and to the players, um, I mean employees) as annual "employee evaluations" are performed. 

As an example, given stage #3, how is a school going to deal with a situation where there are numerous 8+ year "employees" with a "meets expectation" but needs to get rid of them to make room for a great HS players or "transfers"?  They could artificially "downgrade" an employee's evaluation, but anybody that's familiar with the corporate world knows this can lead to lots of trouble, including more lawsuits if they don't have a lot of info to back it up.  And if you're in a public school, I'm sure there's a ton of processes to go through before terminating an employee, i.e. PIP plan, etc.

Things like this is what will cause the situation to advance to stage #4 more quickly.

Regarding the NFL, once we hit stage #4, schools will become even more direct minor league/farm systems for the NFL and the NFL will begin to get MUCH more involved.  Luckily, NFL teams and owners are some of the most upstanding, values-minded people, so they won't do anything underhanded. /sarc