Freshman ineligibility rules new hot-button NCAA issue

NEW YORK — NCAA president Mark Emmert is glad the Big Ten Conference has sparked a discussion about freshman ineligibility, even though it is an idea fraught with pitfalls.

Emmert spoke Thursday at a meeting of Associated Press Sports Editors, saying the NCAA helped Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany with the conference’s white paper on a socalled year of readiness for freshman football and men’s basketball players.

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

Emmert said freshman ineligibility could be a way to aid those student-athletes who enter college lagging behind the rest of the student body academically.

“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.

Delany pitched the idea of a year of readiness in February and followed up last week with a white paper outlining a plan to make football and men’s basketball players sit out their freshman seasons without losing a year of eligibility. The chances of Delany’s idea becoming reality are slim. He also has acknowledged the Big Ten could not implement freshman ineligibility alone.

In 2016, increased qualifying standards take effect and could cause some athletes to take an academic redshirt. Emmert said freshman ineligibility has nothing to do with stopping one-and-done in men’s college basketball.

“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 oneand-done an issue? Yes. You would never ever want to do freshman ineligibility to deal with one-and-done. A young man or woman shouldn’t have to go to college to become a professional athlete.”

Emmert also weighed in on the debate over football coaches taking part in camps away from their own campuses and often far away. Michigan was the latest school to make news with so-called satellite camps. Coach Jim Harbaugh has announced plans for him and his staff to be guest coaches at camps in Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania and other recruiting hot beds.

The Southeastern Conference prohibits its coaches from guest-coaching at camps far from campus, and the league’s coaches are not happy about the Big Ten’s encroachment.

Incoming SEC commissioner Greg Sankey believes the NCAA needs to determine where coaches can hold camps. Emmert agreed the camp issue is one that should be dealt with by the NCAA Football Oversight Committee, headed by Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby.