From ESPN.com:

The Big Ten is seeking feedback from its members about the possibility of making freshman athletes ineligible for competition as they adjust to college life…. the league says it is gauging interest from its members about a “national discussion regarding a year of readiness for student-athletes.”


The SDS staff discussed the topic of a “Year of Readiness” in college athletics (as well as other related topics) via an email thread. You can read the discussion below:

Jon Cooper:

Oh, the irony of the Big Ten jumping on this bandwagon. The conference that hasn’t recruited well in recent years would be writing its own death wish should it really pursue this idea. It’s not only the Big Ten, but the Pac-12 and ACC are also exploring this concept.

If this were to be mandated, college basketball players would simply bypass college. Why go to college and sit for one year and play another and then head to the NBA? Why not head to France for a year before hitting the NBA Draft? So, the reason for freshmen ineligibility is so that freshmen can adjust to college life and academics. But you are making the ones who can adjust take the biggest hit. A handful of players can’t adjust. The majority can adjust. And this rule would simply hurt the ones who can handle it the most. Besides, the one-and-done first-round NBA picks aren’t going to hang around for more than a year anyway. Regardless, freshmen now-a-days — whether basketball or football — are more prepared to play as freshmen than ever before. This is an archaic idea that needs to be re-buried.

Kevin Duffey:

Don’t we have a redshirt available for kids who need a “year of readiness” ?

I’m against any rule that prevents the best from having an opportunity to shine. Can you imagine Lebron James being forced to goto college, then sit out a year?

Sports is at its best when the best athletes play on the biggest stage for the biggest stakes. Age is irrelevant. Frankly, “eligibility” is irrelevant.

Brad Crawford:

Beginning in the mid to late 2000s when star-ratings from recruiting services became commonplace for true freshmen in college football, coaches began to realize that redshirting a potential impact player — even at 18, 19 years old — meant they were losing a year of eligibility (and possible production) if that player declared for the NFL after his third season.

Coaches at elite, Top 10 programs would never be in favor of a redshirt mandate because they understand the impact a rookie can have in hist first season. It doesn’t have as much influence for others who aren’t blessed with nationally-relevant signing classes annually that are loaded with four and five-star players.

Ethan Levine:

We’re living in the 21st century. Kids playing any sport in a conference as large and wealthy as the Big Ten, Pac 12, ACC, what have you, have been recruited by schools in those conferences for YEARS. Sometimes these kids are being looked at before even beginning high school.

So you’re telling me kids who are that good at that young of an age and are scrutinized that heavily on the Internet in this Twitter age for that long aren’t ready for college when they get there?

All these institutions, be it universities or the conferences they belong to, try to control these athletes like products instead of people. The athletes can’t get paid and they can’t go pro out of high school even though they may be talented enough to do so. That’s a helpless position for a kid who worked his whole life to be good enough to play professionally and then can’t.

And I know this argument is a tired one used more often in debating the legal drinking age, but if an 18 year old is deemed “ready” to join the military and fight for our freedoms at 18, I think he’d be ready for the NFL or NBA if scouts are telling him he’s good enough. If a player isn’t good enough, he just won’t go pro.

But if he is, now it becomes a matter of not letting him. And why? What is gained? Control, that’s what. Control of a player with all the revenue-generating talent and none of the rights because old men who could never hack it on the field/court have all the power. It’s ridiculous.

Christopher Smith:

I think the “Year of Readiness” is a hilarious proposition on the surface. For instance, just look at this guy:

Allegedly that’s a high school senior who will arrive at Auburn’s campus this fall. He looks older than Greg Oden — the current version, not the one who people described as 40 coming out of Ohio State. Does that guy need a “Year of Readiness” before he’s ready to step on a college field?

This reminds me of Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive’s hair-brained suggestions, and that hurts, since I’m a Kings fan.

Quick backstory: Ranadive founded what became a multi-billion dollar tech company. He also coached his daughter’s basketball team, realized two-thirds of the court went unused, and installed a full-court press. The team had such success that Malcolm Gladwell lionized his strategy. Ranadive, an analytics guy at heart, fell in love with basketball and saved the Kings from the Maloof brothers. Then he proceeded to outsource analytics to the public, suggest the team play 4-on-5 with a cherry-picker (hey, it worked for his daughter’s youth team!), hire a coach before a general manager, then empower that GM to fire the coach, and led his executive staff in a “1-2-3 Nik rocks!” chant after drafting Nik Stauskas.

OK, maybe that wasn’t such a quick detour. The point, though, is that Ranadive has the audacity to think he can revolutionize the NBA as a tech genius who succeeded coaching middle school girls. When people laugh at some of his non-sensical ideas, he excuses the laughter as a strict adherence to the old guard and suggests that out-of-the-box thinking will somehow lead the Kings to an as-yet-undiscovered edge. By the way, the Kings are on their third coach of the 2014-15 season and they’re currently the third-worst team in the Western Conference.

Big Ten, we get it. Let’s not be too dismissive of edgy ideas. Let’s think outside the box. Dare to be different. Figure out a way to fix some of the issues arising when amateur athletics and higher education clash so throughly with big-business sports worth billions of dollars each year.

But “A Year of Readiness?” That’s like telling valedictorians from ritzy upstate private schools who got scholarships to Harvard and Yale that they need a year of transition “college prep” classes before they’ll be ready to take their first Ivy-League exam. If an athlete isn’t ready, let them redshirt. If academics is important, advise a kid when he’s making poor decisions. Hire coaches that steer student-athletes in the right direction when careers as a professional athlete seem unlikely. Use the redshirt season already available.

I’m all for avoiding the chains of old thinking and being brave enough to stand on an island to back a smart idea that isn’t accepted by most. I do it regularly. But in this case, the Big Ten floating this idea is the equivalent to thinking a tech company CEO dad coaching his daughter’s basketball team can turn a sad-sack NBA franchise into a winner. It’s silly, and the Big Ten deserves all of our ridicule.

Bret Weisband

I’m struggling to figure out just how this idea came to be. Wasn’t the best quarterback in the Big Ten in 2014 a true freshman? Didn’t Florida State and Oregon get big boosts from guys fresh on campus over the last several years? More and more freshman earn playing time around the country every year it seems like, and these conferences want to run from that?

I don’t want to say they’re considering this “year of readiness” crap because the SEC pounds every other conference in recruiting, but it feels that way just a little bit. To play off of what Christopher said about the poor Kings and Vivek (hey, he’s still better than the Maloofs!), it reminds me of the NCAA outlawing the slam dunk to slow down Lew Alcindor (who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) back in his UCLA days.

What did Lew do when the NCAA took away his easiest path to two points? He developed the most devastating shot in basketball history – the sky hook. The rest of the college hoops world couldn’t stop him on the court, so they took the rule books to slow him.

The problem is, the Big Ten, and whatever other conferences want to get in on this silliness would only be hurting itself. You think an elite recruit is going to go to school in freezing cold weather just to be a practice dummy for a year when they could be making an immediate impact elsewhere? Get real.

Conferences want to keep up this “student-athlete” ideal, I get it. This isn’t the way to do it, though.

Christopher Smith:

The fact that this even made it to the general public to me shows just how unresolved the current climate is in college athletics.

Sure, we have a four-team playoff. Sure, conference realignment now is regulated to a few minor aftershocks, and the big quakes already have passed. But the atmosphere doesn’t feel like something that’s going to settle into calm sunny days. With the potential for power-conference autonomy, revenue that’s growing year over year and student-athletes getting ever braver in asking for more, I feel like we’re going to see a lot of ideas thrown at the proverbial wall in the next several years.

Kevin Duffey:

I was assuming this discussion of the “year of readiness” would naturally lead to a mention of the Sacramento Kings owner, and I’m glad it eventually did. I’ve been secretly hoping that he would be the next SEC commissioner. After all, I heard he ran his own fantasy football league last year, so he’s got the experience box checked.

Should Vivek (I prefer to call him by his first name) take over the SEC, he could implement all kinds of awesome new rules.

For instance, let’s eliminate equal distribution of television revenue. Why is Vandy getting the same share of the conference TV money as Alabama? The ‘Dores have the sweetest deal in sports. If you keep the distribution equal, at least fine the program for hiring Derek Mason.

On the field, we’ve heard the discussion around a rule to slow down up-tempo offenses by preventing snaps before ten seconds or so have ticked off the clock. Vivek would probably do the opposite. All teams must snap the ball within ten seconds or get penalized. It’d be beautiful chaos.

Most importantly, Vivek’s reign as SEC Commish would introduce SEC fans to his daughter, who likes to be known as Anjali World. Finally, we can fill the Katherine Webb void!

In all seriousness, does the Big Ten’s Jim Delany hate football? Didn’t he float the idea that the Big Ten might consider de-emphasizing athletics and go the Division-III route should the players win a share of college football’s television revenues?

Getting back to Christopher’s point, I would agree that college football will continue to navigate structural changes and proposals, though it’s mostly surrounding issues that 99% of fans don’t care about. Are the games great? Yep. Do fans enjoy the regular season and the postseason? Absolutely.

Ask an average fan if freshmen athletes should be ineligible, and you’d likely get a straight-forward, confused, “Why would you do that?” type response. Sometimes the most simple answer is the best answer.