Knudson: Should Freshman Be Ineligible Again?

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By Mark Knudson, The Mtn. Insider
August 1, 2011

At his first Big Ten Media Day, Nebraska football coach Bo Pelini threw out a nugget to chew on.

Pelini thinks college freshman shouldn’t be eligible to play varsity sports.

Freshman were ineligible for college sports up until the early 1970s. In football during that time, many schools had freshman and/or JV teams that played on the Friday before the big game the next day. Come Saturday, the freshman stood and watched. It was the accepted practice and worked out well.

Of course, there were examples of freshman who were varsity-ready when they arrived on campus. In basketball, there’s the famous story from 1955 about Kansas freshman Wilt Chamberlain, who was ineligible to play for the Jayhawks varsity that year, leading the KU freshman team to a drubbing of the powerful KU varsity in the preseason. There’s a similar story about Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) at UCLA in the mid 1960s.

It was a combination of examples like those, and the economics of the situation – having a large part of your roster ineligible meant school’s had to increase roster (and scholarship) sizes – that led the NCAA to scrub the rule in the early 1970’s.

So freshman have been eligible for better than 40 years now, and few people are complaining, especially on the basketball side where one-and-done is the norm for pro prospects. Red shirting also allows a program to sit out players they don’t feel are ready to contribute. It’s been a long time since anyone voiced the opinion that the fourth-year coach of the Cornhuskers is advocating.

Pelini’s reasons for wanting to make freshman sit out their first year in school are admirable. Let them get acclimated to college. Let them concentrate on academics for their first year. He left one out.

I’ve long advocated making freshman sit out their first season on campus for those reasons and one more that makes just as much sense: Physical maturity, or the lack thereof. The vast majority of freshman bodies simply aren’t ready for the pounding, especially in football. We’re talking about 18-year-old boys who are being thrown to the lions against 22-year-old men. These kids have spent little or no time in a college weight room yet and they’re competing in a violent manner with fully developed grown men. It’s not a fair fight.

Freshman who play a lot their first season get hurt a lot. Take the career of heralded running back Marcus Houston, a Denver kid who signed with Colorado. Right out of the shoot, Houston was CU’s main man, getting the ball like he was a seasoned workhorse back in the mold of Earl Campbell. Predictably, Houston got hurt in the season’s third game and was never the same after that. He transferred to Colorado State for his last season but failed to make an impact as a Ram, either. A brilliant kid, Houston will no doubt be heard from off the field sometime soon; just never on the field. Houston had a teammate, quarterback Craig Ochs, who also started as a freshman at CU and had his promising career cut short by a series of concussions that began when he was a freshman.

Injuries are a part of football to be sure. Upperclassmen get concussions, too. But at least their bodies are more ready for the physical demands.

Numerous Mountain West freshman, like Colorado State quarterback Pete Thomas, are able to avoid serious injury their first season, but that doesn’t mean they get away unscathed. The cumulative effects of countless hits Thomas took last season took a toll on the young man as the season went along. He was obviously worn down during the season’s final weeks, and Thomas playing hurt didn’t help his team, which finished the season with a thud. That sort of thing doesn’t happen as often after a year or two in a weight-training program.

There will likely be a sensational freshman or two that explode on the Conference scene this fall, but do they represent the majority? For every frosh who excels this season, there will be a half dozen or more that suffer some sort of serious injury that they will have to overcome in order to continue their playing careers. You just hope those injuries don’t linger and continue to hamper them later in their careers like Houston’s did.

There are, of course, a lot of reasons why freshman will never be made ineligible, most of them money-related. It doesn’t make sense to have one-quarter of your roster unable to play. They would have to up the scholarship limits, which would in turn cost the school more money.

Therefore it won’t happen.

But it would happen if we put the well being of the student athlete at the top of the list.