This has become something far murkier in the last few years post-COVID. Today it was announced that the UVA football players that didn't get to finish their final season of eligibility due to the tragedy that occurred there will be granted an additional year of eligibility. I like this move by the NCAA, just find it to be so crazy how long some students are able to play college ball compared to the past. For example, Keytaon Thompson is a receiver for UVA. According to ESPN, he has announced his intention to enter the NFL draft, but if he changed his mind and returned to school, this would allow him a seventh! year of eligible stats. I don't know if he redshirted in that time, but he was a running back that ran for 446 yards and 6 touchdowns in 2017, and then played running back in 2018, 2019, and 2020, then receiver in 2021 and 2022. Theoretically, he could play receiver again in 2023 at UVA.

Four years always felt short to me, in some instances. I'm glad there is some better flexibility with the NCAA these days.

Wonder if it should be a 'games played' marker in this new world, something like once your 40th game in is played in football, you're not eligible for the next season and once your 115th game is played in basketball, you're not eligible for the next year.

I saw this last night. Sobering. It’s getting less fun or I’ve turned into old get off my lawn guy. I assume that was part of the large amount of PWO’s Ohio took last season. You start assessing how many kids would normally get D1 offers and once they see that there aren’t any or no place to go you try to grab a couple.

It's 5 years, not 4. And the Courts and legislatures have dictated this.

Thinking about this, with with the knowledge that more transfer down than up, this is how I see it:
1. P5 Schools - this will help them. The will lose a few players who weren't playing anyway, opening up more new scholarships each year.
2 P5 Tier players - this will be a net positive for them. Those that end up playing will be unaffected, while some of those who would have labored on the 2d and 3rd team in obscurity will have a second chance by transferring down.
3. G5 schools - this will help them in one way, and hurt them in another. Rather that taking unknown Freshmen, many of their slots can be filled with transfers, allowing them to have programs that are more stable year after year. On the other hand, they will lose some of their best players, who will transfer up.
4. G5 Tier players - Some players who formerly took G5 offers will end up in the newly opened P5 positions, but other player who formerly got G5 offers will end up as walkons because the G5 schools will offer substantially less players each year. I'm guessing that G5 schools will end up offering 10-15 Freshmen a year instead of ~20 a year in the past.

Players in general will also benefit another way. Coaches will always have to be cognizant of the fact that any player could transfer at any time, so all coaches will have to treat all their players well. This is no different than the rest of the world, by the way, where if the manager at FictiousName Restaurant treats their employees poorly, they have a lot of turnover.

Was hoping this would be a thread discussing which of our seniors still have a Covid year available, especially on the defensive side of the ball.

L.C., that's a good analysis. I'm left wondering, though, where in the heck does academics fit into this picture. With some of these guys transferring every year in football and even more so it appears in basketball, how can they possibly keep on track for getting a degree? Or, is that too 20th century of a concern? Some of you scoffed at the term student-athlete, but boy was it more consistent with the concept of college athletics than the semi-pro "ringer" paradigm we seem to be in now.

The decades of athletes enrolled in paper classes isn't worth nostalgia. Student-athlete was branding you all got all fell hard for, not something reflected in the culture and actions of the NCAA or D1 schools.

NIL money isn't going to get in the way of a path to a degree. If a non athlete chose to transfer, nobody would scold them about the decision or scoff about how little they care about education. Getting a degree is a personal goal, that an individual owns. It's not the job of the University or NCAA to build a prohibitive structure to enforce that it happens, and that people talk about athletes as if they need the Draconian NCAA policy to succeed in life says more about the person who feels that way than it does about the athletes.

Truly condescending nonsense. This is as simple as personal freedom. There are people here who seem to hate that idea when it's applied to college athletes. Why?

School for most of these athletes are online and not in demanding majors. As evident by the fact grad rates are going up.

I would argue that "student-athletes" was a very successful way of creating upward mobility. Over the years, many people who had never had a family member go to college ended up with college scholarships. Not all of them, of course, but some of them made the most of an opportunity they would not have have had otherwise. I know many people who, after attending college on an athletic scholarship, went on to successful careers in a variety of areas.

Can you point out where it’s the NCAA that uses this as propaganda?