Athletic eligibility, NIL and free agency

[ugarte]

if you think it's bad for us imagine how they're reacting to the age limit in hamden

[BearLover]

if you think it's bad for us imagine how they're reacting to the age limit in hamden

I know you joke but this change would be pretty great for Q, they'd have 10 fifth year transfers. Yeah they'd be 23 instead of 25, but Rand can manage.

[stereax]

Five year clock, starting from 19 or high school graduation, whichever is earlier. That's the proposal.

For Cornell hockey, that shouldn't be too painful - most of our guys come in at 20, don't they? So four years from there.

I am almost certain that the majority of hockey players in that good-but-not-great tier would simply repeat a year of high school so as to not be caught in the eligibility web.

While I think this is a good idea in principle - because some of the football, basketball, etc cases have been wild - I think the implementation of it as it stands is gonna lead to many athletes taking extra years in high school specifically to preserve eligibility. Which is dumb and not what should be enforced. If you want to do a flat five years of eligibility, cool. Tie it directly to age then and keep your limited maternity/military exemptions. Cause under this system, a guy who graduates high school at 15 and pursues, say, hockey as a full-time junior athlete gets screwed over when he wants to apply for college eligibility as an 18-year-old. ("No hockey player would graduate high school at 15" may I introduce you to Zayne Parekh?)

Flat five years without age restrictions would be an extinction-level event for Ivy national competitiveness. Sports are zero-sum, so even if it doesn't impact our own players directly, if all our opponents are able to get five years out of their best players or bring in the best fifth-year grad student transfers, they'll have a massive edge over the Ivies.

With age restrictions, it is a little better for the Ivies but still very bad. As you rightly pointed out, kids can now just repeat a year in high school and get five years even if they start college at age 19. If kids couldn't do that, then hockey would be okay, since only the true freshmen coming straight from high school would get 5 years. Those kids are usually the very best recruits who wouldn't want to stay 5 years anyway.

In other sports like lacrosse, this would be a complete disaster for the Ivies. Maryland, Duke, Johns Hopkins et al would be stacked with the most elite fifth years, and we'd be severely disadvantaged. The silver lining to me is that this could get the Ivy League to allow grad student athletes. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but at least this is a possible impetus for them finally changing it.

The only Ivy sport that benefits from this rule change is basketball. Now we would be less likely to see players like Fiegen graduate early since they'd still have a fifth year at the end regardless. But this comes at the expense of nuking the competitiveness of every other sport - hockey, lacrosse, wrestling, etc.

I mean... in hockey, aren't grad transfers still very much a thing anyway? (Involving having missed a large chunk of at least one season, but still.) And the guys who are doing those grad transfers aren't the elite ones anyway. Of course this is different in sports with lower professional prospects (such as lax), where a lot more students will want to pursue that fifth year.

I definitely see your point on a lot of this though, that an increased ability to grad transfer can definitely lead to "stacked" grad teams, but at the same time I feel like if everyone is competing for grad students, then it'll even out.