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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.
YES eligibility limitations; YES hiring limits: TBD
YES eligibility limitations; NO hiring limits: TBD
NO eligibility limitations; YES hiring limits: TBD
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
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