The NCAA’s new academic redshirt rule will leave some recruits ineligible as freshmen

It’s hard enough for college athletes to play as true freshmen, but starting in 2016, some will not even have the option. The reason? Academics.

In 2012, the NCAA enacted a so-called “academic redshirt,” starting with this upcoming recruiting class. Athletes who don’t meet certain entry requirements are required to sit out a year of competition, though they are still permitted to practice.

High school students still need to have at least a 2.0 GPA and complete 16 core classes to participate in Division I sports, but now, they’ll need to have a 2.3 GPA and 10 of their core courses locked in by the start of their senior year to play in their first year without redshirting.

The NCAA says its goal is to make sure athletes are more prepared in the classroom when it comes time to compete. According to the association, the new rules will likely affect eight percent of men’s basketball players, five percent of football players and two percent of athletes overall.

“The big thing they’re trying to stop is these miracle qualifiers who re-take six core classes their senior year,” Arkansas director of compliance Will Landreth said.

No longer can athletes make up all the classes they missed in the last year of high school, nor can they slack off early on.

“A lot of times, why are these standards put in place?” Todd Leyden, the director of the NCAA Eligibility Center asked. “It’s because of abuse in the system.”

Indeed, that happens at times in recruiting, according to SB Nation recruiting analyst Bud Elliott.

“It’s common for players to screw around for their first five semesters and then start caring in the classroom once they start getting college interest,” Elliott said. “This new rule will bring an end to that in some respects.”

The implication from the NCAA seems to be that the completing a year or two of core classes in a few short months before enrolling was being accomplished by less than legitimate means. Rather than investigating the legitimacy of all those makeup courses, a difficult task, this rule just strikes any attempt to do so.

One possible consequence of the new rules is that coaches won’t recruit players that they know won’t be eligible as true freshmen. However, in football, that’s unlikely to be a major issue.

Since so many football freshmen redshirt anyway, due to the physicality of the sport, players who are given academic redshirts are likely to have been on the redshirt track already.

Even those players who were not planning to be on the redshirt tack could still receive offers. Football coaches are much more likely to make four-year or five-year commitments to players than coaches in other sports, both because of the development aspect, and because the rosters are so large.

That’s particularly true of top prospects.

“Football is so position driven and recruiting class driven anyway, it’s all about filling holes, and they’ll take kids and redshirt them,” Landreth said. “And if he’s good enough to play in the SEC ... you would want the kid now instead of saying, you know what, once that kid goes to the junior college he’s on the recruiting market again anyway.”

At most, the forced redshirt status might serve as a tie-breaker between two equally talented recruits.

On the flip side, there will be some players who aren’t quite good enough to command the leverage that top SEC recruits do. That means the best option for those players might be junior college.

The JUCO route could also be best for players who are simply dead set on playing their true freshman year, and possibly could have for a power conference team with good enough grades.

That means junior college teams, which typically get recruits who are looking for places to play at the last second, will have a much better idea of who they will be recruiting.

“We’ll know at the end of their junior year, a good chance that, hey this guy is either a going to junior college or he’s going to have to take an academic redshirt,” Iowa Western Community College head coach Scott Strohmeier said. “In the past, nobody wants to talk to a junior college coach.”

Now, even if they don’t want to, Division I-level prospects might be forced to talk to JUCO coaches.

For recruits who don’t have leverage, this could hurt their ability to get to college. That’s particularly true of players who are late bloomers in high school and don’t know that they’ll be going Division I until late in the process.

For some, the impetus to work in the classroom comes once they turn into top players, which may be too late.

The NCAA’s stated goal with the new rules is improving graduation rates, but some coaching leaders, including Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson III, Texas Tech coach Tubby Smith and former Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt — part of the National Association for Coaching Equity and Development —€” are worried the rules will adversely affect athletes from low-resource schools.

“If you want to exclude kids from playing college sports, then come out and say it, but don’t say you’re trying to help kids graduate from college,” Hewitt said. “I’ve had people in the NCAA tell me, we know it’s going to have a disproportionate impact on kids in certain communities. And then you’re going to go through it anyway?”

Another major criticism is whether banning athletes from competition for a year will actually help them graduate.

Athletes who must take a so-called academic redshirt year are only banned from playing in games — they are still allowed to practice, even though game time is nominal compared to practice time. Leyden said their research shows that these rules are the best predictors of helping athletes graduate, though he did not present the specific reasoning behind the research. From his experience, Hewitt disagrees.

“We’re putting in a rule that does nothing to identify who can graduate from college,” he said.

What it will do, however, is drastically reduce the NCAA’s burden of figuring the legitimacy of high school courses.