A decision should be made on this soon, but it’s looking like winter athletes will not receive an extra year of eligibility despite many of them missing out on a full postseason. It’s fun to think about seeing some of college basketball’s biggest stars for one more year, but this is the right choice.
Sources: The NCAA is unlikely to grant an extra year of eligibility for student athletes who participated in winter sports and had their seasons cut short due to coronavirus.
An extra year of eligibility is still in play for student athletes involved with spring sports.
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) March 18, 2020
This is an idea that benefits seniors like Cassius Winston, Markus Howard, Udoka Azubuike and others, but handing all college basketball players an extra year on the hardwood hurts more players than it helps.
This hypothetical is assuming the extra year would be given to all winter athletes and not just seniors, which would be even worse.
Anybody who redshirted this season to prepare for a big role next year likely wouldn’t see much time because the rotation of returning players would probably stay close to the same. Additionally, anybody who redshirted at some point during their career would be in college 6 years in order to play their senior season.
How many players want to be in college for 6 years without a paycheck and start looking for a job at age 24? I think it would be low.
This is an even bigger issue for incoming recruits and creates a mess trying to manage scholarships. If a team expected to lose 5 seniors and already signed 5 freshmen to replace them, that’s an issue. Transfer season would be wild, and kids’ college futures change drastically just because some seniors missed out on a few more games.
And what about the teams whose seasons actually had a conclusion? People aren’t talking enough about this, but 28 conference tournaments started, and 13 conference championships were played. Nearly 300 teams don’t make the NCAA Tournament, so plenty of seasons finished even before the coronavirus canceled everything.
For all the seniors, of course this sucks but everybody played a full regular season and everybody had their Senior Night. Nobody gets a chance to have their name remembered forever with a deep run in the 2019-20 NCAA Tournament.
It’s not fair, but sometimes life isn’t fair. Time to move on and welcome in the next stars of college hoops starting in November.
Keep the conversation going by reaching out to Erik Buchinger on Twitter or email erik@deceptivespeed.com.