Let me start off by saying I am and always will be a Big Ten fan. It is home to my future alma mater (unless I pull a Bill Gates and transfer to Harvard, fingers crossed) and represents my hometown region of the Midwest.
I provide this disclaimer because for the next few hundred words, I will be taking my Big Ten cap off, dousing it with gasoline and lighting it on fire. A few weeks ago, the Big Ten announced they would consider making athletes ineligible to participate in competition during their freshman year, allowing them to concentrate more on their education and adjust to college life. Let’s break down why that idea is one of the most preposterous propositions I have ever heard.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a follower of the Cardale Jones Doctrine. Academics are very important, and the “student” part of student-athlete should never be forgotten. However, making freshmen ineligible for real game play will simply not move the academic needle.
First of all, making freshman athletes ineligible for competition will not necessarily translate to more time spent in the library. Football players who redshirt their freshman year still show up to the games on the sidelines, and at the last game I went to, I didn’t exactly see any of them rocking a calculus book on the bench. The league could ban freshman athletes from attending games and supporting their teammates, but that would just add to the long list of college athletic contradictions where the core concept of teamwork is flushed down the toilet.
While games can consume a large chunk of time per week, especially in basketball and other sports that have more than one weekly contest, a majority of an athlete’s time is spent at practice. Unless practice time for freshmen is significantly reduced, another absurd idea, being a scholarship or even walk-on athlete still will be extremely time consuming.
Besides that, making a kid sit out a whole year from real game play is just silly. There is no replacement experience for actual game action. A large percentage of freshman athletes only play sparingly, and that’s fine because they are most likely not ready to see action against elite competition. However, any playing time at that age can be important, especially just to get the feel of a collegiate atmosphere.
Additionally, if an athlete is physically ready and possesses the skill and talent to compete at a high level, it would just be unethical to make a player warm the bench all year. Their skills could potentially erode since they likely haven’t taken a season off since preschool. While college is primarily a place of higher education, it is also an institution that prepares attendees for their professional careers in all fields. Placing a freshman athlete with pro athletic prospects hinders this idea.
If we are really being honest with ourselves, the target of this rule is mainly the one-and-done era of men’s college basketball, as athletes in all other sports, even football, stay past their freshman year. While the one-and-done concept does have its errors, fixing it by making freshmen ineligible is not the answer. Many men’s basketball teams rely on freshmen to make a significant impact, and eliminating that impact does the sport no justice.
Not allowing freshmen to play diminishes the on court product, as many of the best players in the country are routinely in their first year, such as Duke’s Jahlil Okafor and Ohio State’s D’Angelo Russell. Having them sit out this season would have not only been bad for the sport, but also for their own personal careers.
While I almost never root against the Big Ten, this is one issue where I hope they lose badly. Freshmen have been eligible for varsity sports since 1972. Let’s keep it that way.
