Starting in June of this past year, the NCAA Division I Cabinet approved new eligibility rules for student athletes. While this news may have gone unheard by many around the country, it is a massive change for the trajectory of college sports.
For the majority of the history of the NCAA, an athlete has been able to play up to four athletic seasons within five years. If an athlete does not play during their freshman season, they are allowed to “redshirt” that year and have it not count against their eligibility. In other words, if for some reason an athlete does not play (or plays very little) during a season, that season will not be counted as one of the four years they played.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course. For instance, athletes could receive a medical redshirt via a waiver in a situation where they suffer a season- ending injury early on and cannot play the whole year. Additionally, athletes who played during 2020, the COVID season, were also granted another year of eligibility.
This has led to many athletes in college being older than their professional counterparts! A wild world we live in. So wild, in fact, that for the past three years, the New York Times sports newsletter The Athletic has made what they call the “All-Geezer Football Team,” including athletes who have had upwards of six, seven, or eight years of eligibility.
The June ruling has changed much of this and will continue to change it. The NCAA must have gotten tired of The Athletic’s “All-Geezer Teams” because athletes under this new eligibility now have five years to play five seasons. No medical redshirts, no waivers.
To prevent older student athletes from competing in sports, the new rules make it so that one’s eligibility clock starts upon full-time enrollment in a college or at the beginning of an academic year following one’s 19th birthday, whichever would come first.
Fascinatingly, this has had a trickle effect down into Division II sports. Division II sports have changed from a semester/quarter model for eligibility to the same model Division I has instituted. As of now, Division III has not adopted nor shown any sign of adopting any form of these new rules.