AFCA needs to explain why four years plus four games is better than five years.
Throughout NCAA history, coaches associations have been the source of some of the more entertaining and/or complicated NCAA legislative proposals. The National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) has generally been the leader in this realm, with my personal favorite being the mentoring proposal from the 2004–05 legislative cycle. The American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) has generally lagged behind the NABC in advancing and advocating for NCAA legislation, but in recent years the AFCA has gotten more active.
That activity has now produced a proposal the AFCA is sending to the NCAA which would allow players to redshirt provided they play in four games or fewer in a season. While the AFCA’s intentions are in the right place, the end product is a textbook example of the type of legislation that people love to hate when it comes to the NCAA.
First off, the headline benefit of the proposal is its ability to “fix” or “save” bowl games from the threat of an epidemic of Leonard Fournettes and Christian McCaffreys: star players who sat out less prestigious bowl games in order to avoid an injury that would have hurt their draft stock. While the AFCA’s executive director Todd Berry says this isn’t a new phenomenon, the fact that he has to tell us means it would be a big overreaction to significantly change NCAA eligibility rules to fix a problem no one else knew existed until last year. And if bowl games are in that much trouble, I doubt letting some freshmen backups play is likely to be the solution.
Then there’s this bit of fantasy from proponents of the proposal:
The rule would eliminate the need for injured players to apply for “medical redshirts.”
I can see three immediate problems with that line of thinking. First, if the rule is you can play four games without using a season of eligibility, then the race will be on to see which school files for a medical redshirt for a player who got injured in his fifth game. Second, schools will still need to track which athletes would have gotten a medical redshirt and will often file for them with the conference anyway to record the two “denied participation opportunities” necessary to get a sixth year of eligibility. And third, this will complicate those sixth year cases by messing with the definition of a denied participation opportunity. If you get hurt in a bowl game, you don’t qualify for a medical redshirt (since you played in the second half of the season) but if that’s the only game you played, did you really have a true participation opportunity?
There are a lot of benefits of the proposal though. Players won’t lose a whole year of playing for playing in one game. Coaches can work with a larger available roster which means potentially more rotation and less wear and tear on players. And coaches and players won’t be put to very painful decisions when it comes to putting in a backup vs. preserving his redshirt. There are also documented academic benefits when athletes feel more connected to their team.
The problem though is that all of these benefits are even stronger with a simpler and older proposal: letting football players play five seasons. That was last proposed in 2011 by the Colonial Athletic Association. It provides all the same benefits as the four-game redshirt proposal, if not to a greater degree. And it comes without the baggage of managing which athletes have played in four games already. If the starting quarterback gets hurt in game 7 of a 12 game season, the coach is still put in a similar position of having to burn a full season of eligibility on a less than full season for the player.
Giving football players five seasons of competition is not without its own set of problems, most of which revolve around whether you have waivers of any kind (the CAA proposal said no, I think you should have sixth year waivers as you have now) and how fast it expands to other sports (my guess would be within a couple years after football adopted it). But the four-game redshirt proposal has those same issues as well, in addition to the others discussed above.
That should be the standard the AFCA should be held to when this proposal is debated in the NCAA’s governance structure. If the AFCA proposal gets traction, it means the philosophical question of whether athletes should be allowed to play during five seasons without any sort of injury or waiver has been answered. It should then be up to the AFCA to explain why it is better to do so in this more limited and complicated way versus skipping the interim step and going straight to five full-years of eligibility.
Because if this proposal passed, five seasons of competition would be an inevitability. Except having spent time, energy, and political capital on it, it wouldn’t come immediately. The NCAA legislative process wouldn’t be likely to return to the topic for at least a couple of years. So ultimately the charge to the AFCA is to explain why doing a limited change this year and the real change maybe three to five years from now is better for more athletes than say just going to five seasons of competition either this year or next.
