With the college football season fast approaching and confusion defining the times, the sport’s conferences have opted to take eligibility matters into their own hands.
The SEC and Big Ten spurred the rest of the country to take action earlier this week after the leagues opted to officially prevent former professional athletes from returning to compete at the collegiate level.
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And now, the Big 12 has become the latest conference to join the movement, as the league released a statement Wednesday revealing that it has “adopted a conference rule barring Big 12 member institutions from fielding professional athletes in any conference-sponsored sport.”
And as Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger emphasized, the Big 12 opted for a firmer approach to its eligibility rules, choosing to include all athletics and listing out multiple reasons an athlete may be deemed ineligible.
Of course, many people are bringing up the topic of former professional players arriving from overseas, which would heavily impact a handful of Big 12 programs in basketball among other sports.
Dellenger also explained that this rule applies to post-enrollment regarding the athletes themselves, while international players generally fall into the pre-enrollment category and thus have to satisfy a different set of guidelines.
Parker is currently the sports editor for Gulf Coast Media in Foley, Alabama. He's a graduate from Mizzou who has experience covering the Tiger football and basketball beats for SB Nation, and he's worked for a variety of sports news outlets in the past.
