Eligibility is a top concern for Paul Chryst, Wisconsin players
Once the finality of the 2020 Big Ten football season was made Tuesday, canceling all fall sports due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wisconsin head coach Paul Chryst and his players could move forward into planning for the next challenge.
While trying to figure out if a spring football schedule is going to work is a high priority, arguably the top question that came at Chryst from his players were how the season’s cancelation will affect players’ eligibility in the coming years.
“There’s a lot of unanswered questions,” Chryst told reporters Tuesday. “We want to know, and I know they want to know. We want to know it so we can tell them that.”
The problem facing Wisconsin and other Big Ten schools is there has yet to be a universal cancelation of the season among Power Five conferences. While the Pac-12 joined the Big Ten in canceling fall sports, the Big 12 has said it will play this fall, while the ACC and SEC are standing pat.
On Wednesday, the NCAA’s Division I Council officially recommended that the Division I Board of Governors implement a rule that would allow players to keep their full remaining eligibility if they decide not to play because of coronavirus concerns, basically permitting them to extend their five-year eligibility clock.
A player also has the ability to decide midseason to opt-out as well. The council is recommending that a player can retain his or her eligibility if they play in half or fewer of a season’s games before opting out. The Board of Governors will vote next week.
“In this time of uncertainty, the Council members are working to create additional flexibility for college athletes whose seasons have been negatively impacted by the pandemic,” M. Grace Calhoun, the Division I Council chair and Penn’s athletic director, said in a statement. “Every day things are changing in college sport, and we want to be as responsive as possible, with the best information, to help student-athletes and their families make important decisions for their future.”
The eligibility decision gets more complicated if schools play a modified spring schedule. Chryst, athletic director Barry Alvarez and several Big Ten coaches and administrations have agreed that it would be dangerous to play a spring schedule followed by a full fall 2021 schedule, with Chryst saying the starting point to spring football is determining how the fall schedule would look.
Purdue coach Jeff Brohm released a tentative plan that called for an eight-game spring schedule beginning in late February and ending in late April followed by a 10-game fall schedule starting early October and ending early December.
“That’s something that has to be discussed when you are talking about spring football, is this enough to count as a good season?” Chryst said. “If I’m a senior, is that how I want to spend my last season? … I know that you can’t set a perfect world, but I think what you are asking is really real for them. As you talk about how we go forward, that’s part of my position is how to speak for them and advocate for them.”
“I think there was a lot of talk to about the unintended, that if you are healthy but if you were in a quarantine,” he added. “Right or wrong, if you sprain your ankle, you’ve got a bad hamstring or something that you miss games, you kind of know why. If you have a bad shoulder, you’re out two weeks. When you are healthy, that’s a hard one to process.”
Ohio State head coach Ryan Day floated the idea that Big Ten and Pac-12 players could play two seasons in one calendar year, therefore exhausting one year of eligibility. Based on NCAA rules, a season is characterized by a calendar year. Therefore, there is an opportunity for players to get two “seasons” under their belt by exhausting just one year of eligibility.
From the NCAA:
Division I five-year clock: If you play at a Division I school, you have five-calendar years in which to play four seasons of competition. Your five-year clock starts when you enroll as a full-time student at any college. Thereafter, your clock continues, even if you spend an academic year in residence as a result of transferring; decide to red shirt, if you do not attend school or even if you go part-time during your college career.
There’s also the question of money. Alvarez has said Wisconsin is expected to lose upwards of $100 million this season without football, resulting in strict cost-cutting measures and furloughs. In the spring, when the NCAA granted senior spring sport student-athletes an extra year of eligibility, Wisconsin was one of a handful of schools to decline to do so in part because of cost.
“There was an overreaction by the NCAA when they canceled spring sports, giving everyone that year of eligibility,” Alvarez said at the time. “That creates a lot of problems. It’s more complicated than that as far as numbers, and then you have another group coming in.”
Wisconsin football was expected to have 15 seniors on scholarships this season. When asked about their fate, Chryst said he couldn’t give an answer because of the amount of uncertainty.
“You’ve got to kind of wait for it to happen,” Chryst said. “We’re going to start the discussion of what can we do and how do we make the right decision. Our department has done everything for our group, and I appreciate it, and I think it’ll continue to be that.”