Eligibility decision leaves plenty of questions

On Monday, the NCAA Division I Council made the decision to extend an extra year of eligibility to all athletes who participate in spring sports. Well, sort of. What the council actually did is allow the member schools to extend that extra year... if they want to.

NCAA athletes are allowed five years to complete four years of competition. With the spring sports season cut short due to complications from COVID-19, none of those athletes completed more than a fraction of this season. This year basically doesn't exist according to the NCAA.

But the decision isn't nearly as simple as it sounds, and may not apply to all schools.

“The Council’s decision gives individual schools the flexibility to make decisions at a campus level,” said Council chair M. Grace Calhoun, in a release. “The Board of Governors encouraged conferences and schools to take action in the best interest of student-athletes and their communities, and now schools have the opportunity to do that.”

What the release didn't say is that schools have the option to reduce or eliminate athletic aid for returning players. Very few spring sport athletes are on a full scholarship. But say you have a senior who is receiving a scholarship to cover 25% of his costs. The school can make the decision to allow him to come back with that same scholarship or it can reduce or eliminate it all together.

So if a player hasn't contributed as much as the coach thought he would? No money. He just lost the year. If there's someone behind him who the coach feels will contribute more or if there's a prospect that will sign if he gets that money, poof, the scholarship is going to disappear.

Now, let's not be naive. This happens all the time. It's just never so brazen. Players are told — especially in football and basketball — that they might be better off finding a school where they're going to play more. It's often phrased as if the coaches are doing the player a favor, but what they're really doing is freeing up a scholarship for someone they think can help the team more. The difference now is that the NCAA is giving carte blanche to coaches and programs to do it out in the open.

I need to make sure I present the other side here too. There's some sympathy for the schools. They're the ones that have to pay for this. So it sounds great to say, let's just give everyone the same scholarship they had last year, and then also give our incoming freshmen what we promised them because the scholarship limit doesn't apply for a year, and then everyone's happy. Well, everyone except the people footing the bill.

Missouri, according to figures in this story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had 140 athletes in spring sports on scholarship at a price tag of about $26,000 each in the 2019 fiscal year. If you up that by 25% to bring in another full class of scholarship athletes, you're talking about another $910,000. For a department that has operated at a deficit the last few years, is due to take an $8-10 million haircut from the NCAA and doesn't know for sure that it will have a full football season, which is its main source of revenue.

So I understand why some schools are going to have to cut scholarship money. That doesn't mean I have to like that it's going to happen.

The NCAA made the easy decision. It made the decision that's going to win in the court of public opinion. It also did it too quickly without going through all the potential ramifications. It took a one-year problem and made it into a multi-year problem.

The scholarship limitation is out the window for next year. But it comes back for 2021-22. That means every baseball team has to be back down to 11.7 scholarships in two years. Well, one full class of players that would have been gone by then is still on campus. Some of them are on scholarships. Now a coach doesn't need as many players in his recruiting class as he used to. There are 299 teams that play Division One baseball. Even if you're only talking about one scholarship per team (and in all likelihood it's more), you're going to have nearly 300 kids in the Class of 2021 who aren't going to get the chance to play Division One baseball because of this decision. And the trickle down effect isn't going to stop after one year. It will take four or five years for this whole process to normalize. You're talking about thousands of spring sport athletes across the country who just saw astronomical odds of becoming a Division One player get even higher.

Not to mention the headaches created for coaching trying to balance all this and still field competitive teams under the NCAA guise of doing right by the "student-athletes."

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I get why the NCAA decision was what it was. An organization that is so often accused of being tone deaf would have taken a public beating had it told an entire class of athletes, "Sorry, we know it sucks, but you just didn't get to play this year." But in effect, that's what happened anyway. It's just a different class of players. The ironic part is that if the vast majority of spring athletes had suffered an injury at the same point in the season, they would lose the year of eligibility.

The easy decision was made on Monday. It's the one that will be viewed on the surface as doing right by the kids, and it probably won't receive much blowback. I'm not sure it was the right decision. But to be fair, there probably is no right decision. Everybody's getting hurt by this virus and these unprecedented circumstances. There probably wasn't an answer that would appease everyone or make anyone whole.

Every possible decision has consequences, both known and unforeseen. How we feel about those decisions is colored by the lens through which we view them. I have a son who's a junior in high school. He'll probably have friends impacted by this. I also have one who is a senior in college and, in fact, used to play baseball. He doesn't anymore, but if he did, I'm sure I'd be crushed for him and love this decision. At the same time, I'd feel bad for the high school kids I know who are going to be hurt by it.

It's a popular thing to rail on the NCAA. It's the easy thing to do. Rarely will anyone make you feel bad or wrong for doing it. That's not what I'm trying to do here. I get the difficulty of the situation and the fact that there's no answer that could please everybody. I just wonder if the vote had been put off for a month or two if we could have come up with some answers to come a little bit closer to something that would be good for everyone.

NOTE: I requested a statement from Mizzou Director of Athletics Jim Sterk as well as baseball coach Steve Bieser and softball coach Larissa Anderson for this story. Sterk will be available to local media on a teleconference on Thursday afternoon. I was told Mizzou would like to gather more information prior to publicly commenting on the decision.