Emmert: Freshman Ineligibility Problematic, Worth Debating

The Big Ten has recently sparked a conversation regarding the possibility of making freshman ineligible from competition, as was NCAA policy before that rule was changed in 1972.

On Thursday, at a meeting of the Associated Press Sports Editors, NCAA president Mark Emmert addressed the ongoing conversations. He said that the NCAA has assisted the Big Ten with their conversation on a so-called ‘year of readiness’ for athletes in men’s college football and basketball.

”It’s a really interesting notion that’s worthy of debate,” Emmert said, via Yahoo. ”It has all kinds of problems. It is highly controversial.”

He did note that this could be a possible alternative to the new academic redshirt that will go into effect in 2016 and notes that it could allow the athletes who are lagging behind the rest of the student body academically will have time to focus on improvement in areas of need.

”The real question we need to address: Are students sufficiently serious about being students as well as athletes and are they sufficiently prepared to be successful as a student as well as an athlete?” Emmert said.

Emmert did state that this proposal had nothing to do with preventing one-and-dones in college basketball, which is what many people believed to be initial cause of the discussions.

“Well, that would be a sledge hammer on a mosquito,” he said. ”Because one-and-done in any given year there’s maybe 10 of them, 12 of them? Is one-and-done an issue? Yes. You would never ever want to do freshman ineligibility to deal with one-and-done.”

People should generally take these discussions with a grain of salt, since the chance that this proposal would pass are slim to none.

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*Featured Photo (above) credit to USA TODAY Sports

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