For years under NCAA president Charlie Baker’s predecessor, Mark Emmert, administrators across the country begged for some semblance of leadership out of the organization’s national office. Some direction amid trying times, some rallying cry amid legal losses or some newfound approach to get behind.
Such wishes appear to have been granted as Baker is now firmly advocating for what portends to be the biggest foundational change to how the NCAA operates since freshmen were fully allowed to participate in college athletics back in 1972. Crucially too, he wants it done in the next few months—akin to the speed of light in comparison to how the slow-moving bureaucracy in Indianapolis usually operates.
Baker threw his full-throated support behind a move to the so-called “five-in-five” standard for student-athlete eligibility to eliminate the current restriction in Division I of playing four seasons within a five-year span that features numerous waivers and redshirts. Under the concept, athletes both domestically and internationally would fall under an age-based window of five years to compete beginning upon high-school graduation or when they turn 19 years old.
“The goal here was to come up with something that was a lot simpler and sort of familiar,” Baker says. “If you think about it, we all grow up playing sports and our kids grow up playing sports and it’s U-10, U-12, U-15, U-18, U-20, U-22 leagues, right? The idea of an age-based dynamic or parameter is pretty familiar. That’s the way most of amateur sports is organized in who gets to participate.
“It became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that a lot of people really appreciated the simplicity of [the concept] and the fact that it creates kind of a clock.”
Baker acknowledges the topic of implementing such a policy shift and grandfathering in current athletes remains a topic to sort through before getting this over the line in short order, even if it leads to more legal challenges for an organization dealing with plenty of those already. Many of those billable hours are expected to center around some of the handful of exceptions that could delay the five-year window from starting for athletes, likely limited to a narrow subset of those serving religious missions, in active military service or who become pregnant.
“This is probably the best option that we have at this point,” WCC commissioner Stu Jackson says. “Five in five years doesn’t absolve the NCAA from potential litigation, but it certainly gives us the best fighting chance to avoid it. I’m very supportive of it.”
In anticipation of potentially receiving an extra year of college—and the NIL riches that tend to come with it nowadays—numerous players have already proactively entered the transfer portal in sports like men’s basketball in anticipation of the proposal rapidly becoming reality. Whether or not they’ll be allowed to play that fifth season isn’t set in stone however, which has added to some of the growing confusion for coaches, representatives and administrators that Baker is hoping to sidestep by getting them an answer on this sooner rather than later.
The Division I Cabinet, the decision-making body tasked with day-to-day governance, discussed the idea last week and could vote on emergency legislation as soon as mid-May (it would go into effect the following month). Numerous committees have already weighed in on the broad concept and a subcommittee is expected to put forth a formal proposal that Division I schools can comment on in the next few weeks. Further refinement of policies related to pre- and post-college enrollment are also being examined in the wake of a spate of cases involving former professional players attempting to play in college.
“I have had a lot of people offer me thoughts about implementation, but I haven’t had anybody say to me that this is a bad idea,” Baker says. “Almost everybody I’ve talked to has said it’s simpler and it’s easier to understand if it returns college athletics to the same window that college is supposed to be attached to. It makes it harder for somebody to show up at the age of 19 or 20 or 21 and claim to be a freshman after playing three years of professional sports somewhere else. There’s a lot of things people like about this.”
Ole Miss Rebels quarterback Trinidad Chambliss signals a first down after his run against the Miami Hurricanes. | Joe Rondone/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Another positive would be to eliminate the rash of eligibility lawsuits against the NCAA. Though the organization has emerged victorious often, there have been high-profile losses—such as Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia and Mississippi counterpart Trinidad Chambliss—that prompted a reexamination of the issue and an equal impetus to find a cleaner solution.
Baker does not appear to be stopping at eligibility and said changes are needed with regards to schools tampering with athletes and having impermissible contact like in the recent infractions case involving Iowa.
That’s not an idea from out of the blue. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti sent the NCAA a letter in March calling for a moratorium on tampering investigations and a reexamination of the bylaws surrounding when schools can (or cannot) contact athletes at other schools. While it was largely mocked at the time right before one of the conference’s own schools was slapped on the wrist for violations regarding just that, it’s having its desired effect by prompting further discussion over what the rules should be around such communications.
“The idea here should try to be simpler and cognizant of the fact that the world we live in today is a lot different than the world we lived in two years ago,” Baker says. “Our focus at the moment is to try to see if you can make some changes to the rules to address some of the situations that come with the current environment we’re in. One of the points [Petitti] made in his letter, which I think is shared by a lot of folks, is there does need to be some time when it’s appropriate for agents and for kids to talk, and that probably ought to be either at or around the time the portal opens in that particular sport so the kids have an opportunity to decide whether or not going into the portal is a good idea or a bad idea. It’s a legitimate question.”
One, it seems, that appears to be prompting some rare action from the sprawling NCAA apparatus instead of asking yet more questions to simply pass the time.
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