How long should college athletes play? NCAA is about to give a new answer to that age-old question

Multisport great Jim Thorpe played football at Carlisle for the traditional four years, but he dropped out after his second season in 1908 to play minor league baseball and didn't come back for his third season of college football until 1911.

‘It was just part of the game’

Michael Oriard, who has authored four books on the rise of college football and was a Notre Dame offensive lineman in the 1960s, said he was surprised when his research showed so many examples of men playing into their late 20s and early 30s in the sport's early years.

“When I was playing, it was really important that there not be physically more mature players out on the field beating the crap out of us younger guys," he said. "I don't know why a lot of them kept playing in each individual case, but a lot of really famous players did. It was just part of the game.”

The new age-based eligibility model, which could be approved by the NCAA Division I Council on Friday, would start the eligibility clock for a D-I athlete when they graduate from high school or turn 19, whichever comes first.

The change would address circumstances that led to the aging of rosters across all sports. First, the NCAA offered a one-time, one-year extension to athletes who had their 2020-21 season canceled or altered because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlimited transfers have incentivized coaches to replace departing athletes with older transfers instead of high school and junior college prospects. More recently, dozens of athletes have filed lawsuits seeking to extend their careers, often for financial reasons.

1855 Harvard-Yale controversy

It would be easy to write it off as another symptom of out-of-control modern college athletics. Really, it's nothing new.

Back in 1855, Yale protested when it discovered the coxswain on Harvard's rowing team was an alumnus rather than a currently enrolled undergraduate. It was the first known eligibility dispute in college sports history, and there was no NCAA to settle the matter in those days.

Neither was there a governing body in the early days of college football, and the sport was a veritable free-for-all.

Mercenaries, known as “tramp players," would show up on campuses and never take a class, let alone enroll. They would get paid by alumni or student groups to play a game, or several games, and then move on to the next school. Some were well into their 30s.

According to Camp's biographer, Julie Des Jardins, it was Camp himself who, as Yale's player-coach, proposed in 1882 to limit eligibility to five years. Yes, this was the same Camp who played six-plus seasons.

Handshake agreement formalized

The matter of eligibility got serious by the 1890s when Harvard, Yale and Princeton — the eastern powers that controlled the sport — decided something needed to be done and came up with a handshake agreement, loosely regulated, allowing four years of competition for undergraduates only.

The policy was formalized among the Big Three in 1906, Des Jardins wrote in “Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man,” after Yale graduates confirmed Harvard had a center who had played four years at a school in Indiana before he enrolled in Harvard's law school and joined the Crimson.

The organization that would become the NCAA also formed in 1906, and its immediate concern was to curb the violence, sometimes fatal, that had marred the sport. The 38 charter members agreed eligibility standards were necessary, but only insofar as they related to amateurism, not the number of years an athlete could play.

“What firm eligibility meant was whether or not the kid was a bona fide student and not a longshoreman paid a couple hundred bucks to come fight for your alma mater,” Oriard said.

Weinke won Heisman at 28

In piecemeal fashion, four years of eligibility became standard among eastern schools and the Western Conference (now the Big Ten) in the 1910s. The concept of redshirting began when in 1961 the NCAA began allowing five years to complete four years of competition.

There have always been some exceptions to the conventional college career spanning the ages of 18 and 22. Florida State's Chris Weinke won the 2000 Heisman Trophy at 28, Brandon Weeden was 28 when he threw his last pass for Oklahoma State in 2012 and just last season Monte Harrison caught a pass for Arkansas at the age of 30.

Until 2021, when players started being paid for endorsements, maintaining amateurism was the NCAA's priority. Now, with some athletes wanting to maximize their earnings by staying in college as long as possible, the NCAA considers it critical to set a finite time and maximum age for athletes. The topic seems ripe for litigation.

Oriard gets wistful when discussing the evolution of eligibility rules.

“The age, it was just assumed these were going to be kids,” he said. “This wasn’t an issue. It shocked me when it first became an issue in recent years.”

AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football