OT or Not OT: College Eligibility Question - Jackson Lamb Men's BB
Saw this posted on MGo.Licio.us so may be redundant and removed by Mods but thought this would be a good discussion point. Also may be OT because this is not specifically a question regarding a UM player - but the situation with a UM player raised a bigger question for discussion.
Jackson Lamb - Committed to play Baseball at UM may choose to go pro:
http://www.toledoblade.com/HighSchool/2013/05/30/Bedford-senior-Lamb-may-choose-pro-career.html
Maybe I missed the memo, but how is it that Baseball and Hockey players can be drafted and choose whether or not to go pro or not without compromising their NCAA eligibility. Whereas Football and Basketball players must DECLARE for the draft - thus making them ineligible to continue their collegiate careers?
I feel it's another BS double-standard of the NCAA.
Thoughts?
and I'm pretty certain the NFL as well, require hiring an agent to enter the draft which is against NCAA rules. Not sure of the rules for baseball, but hockey all you need to do is tell the NHL that you're interested in being drafted. As long as you don't sign a contract or hire an agent, you're allowed to play. Another distinction is that NBA and NFL draft rights only exist for one year, while MLB and NHL rules have provisions for longer than that.
I think football, hockey and baseball are more or less fine. A modified version of the baseball rules would probably help NCAA basketball and the NBA, IMO.
Actually, in baseball there's only a short period in which to sign a player drafted out of high school. This is from a page at mlb.com:
Question: When may a selected player who has not utilized all of his potential college eligibility sign?
Answer: Generally, a selected player with college eligibility remaining may sign with the Club that selected the Player from the time of the selection until the second or third Friday of July. For the 2012 signing season, the deadline is Friday, July 13 at 5:00 p.m. ET.
If Lamb doesn't sign with whatever team drafts him next week, that team loses its rights to him, and he'll next be eligible for the draft in 2016.
I misspoke on baseball above, which is especially dumb since I applied it correctly when thinking about basketball going to that system.
Part of it has to do with the league rules mandating that players be out of high school for a given number of years (i.e. 3 for football, one for basketball). In most cases this will be after they have already played in college.
Understood - but even a "one and done" who is eligible for the draft 1 year after HS has to declare - thus compromising their eligibility. Same with Football players who are 3 years removed from HS.
Basketball at least allows them to officially submit for Draft evaluation to get an idea of where they will be drafted - but even that is a crapshoot and only a projection. They make a decision to go or not go based on predictions which may not hold true and could get screwed. Football doesn't even have this formal process.
Just seems it should be the same for all sports - Football and Basketball players should be allowed to "test the waters" the same as Hockey/Baseball without penalty. If that means a team holds a player's rights longer as in the other sports, so be it.
Yes, it's actually a provision included in the collective bargaining agreements in the NBA and NFL. The reason, essentially, that Clarett lost his suit against the NFL was because the court said that those rights were bargained-for between the union and the league(s) and therefore were not a unilateral provision imposed by the leagues. Therefore, the CBA(s) trumped Clarett's interests. (Or something like that).
Just wish it were consistent between the sports. All four have different rules on amateurism. Seems like a typical NCAA quadruple-standard.
it's the individual professional leagues. If the NFL wants to change its draft rules to allow drafted players to come out of high school or keep playing in college, that's on them, not the NCAA. Same goes with the NBA.
The only thing the NCAA says is that you cannot hire an agent and you cannot sign a professional contract. Since the NFL and NBA require agents to enter the draft, those players become ineligible.
Exactly.
I assume that we all agree that it wouldn't be fair to allow a professional league to draft a player against his wishes and have him lose eligibility that way, correct? In other words, I can't start a professional football league and then have my teams draft every player on the Ohio State roster in order to take away their eligibility. So in sports like hockey and baseball, where you automatically become eligible for the draft when you turn 18, you are protected from losing your amateur status unless you actually sign with the team.
For whatever reason (the reason is actually obvious, but that's a different topic for conversation), the NFL and NBA don't run their drafts that way, where every 18-year-old is automatically eligible. To be eligible for those drafts, you have to have completed your college eligibility or to have "declared" for the draft. That's a completely different situation, and the NCAA has chosen to interpret that act as the act of becoming a professional and, therefore, it costs the student his remaining eligibility.
It has everything to do with the different ways the 4 major sports run their drafts, and not with the NCAA treating the sports differently.
All the NCAA needs to do is allow everyone to take money from wherever they want, as long is it isn't coming from gamblers. Although it would have to be addressed directly, they would also need to let people declare themselves eligible but come back if they aren't drafted highly enough.
In basketball and football, the NCAA has basically "reverse leveraged" themselves into following rules that benefit the pro leagues, screw the "student-athlete," and provide no benefit to the NCAA or its teams.
This leads me to believe one of two things is happening: either they are stupid, or some money is changing hands under the table. I am leaning toward option number one at this point.
Disagree. The colege presidents (who are the NCAA) want to discourage the players in the revenue sports from leaving early. They therefor impose a cost on the decision to submit to the draft "lottery." If there was no cost, every player would decalre for the draft at every oporunity.
In NCAA D-1, baseball programs can hand out only 11.7 scholarships, and these are allocated to the more than two dozen players on the roster. Very few baseball players get full athletic scholarships or an athletic scholarship as large as 85%. Those go only to the top players, which indicates how highly the Michigan coaches think of Jackson Lamb.
Here's a good breakdown of the scholarships per sport—College Athletic Scholarship Limits—with a better explanation than mine:
Why are there fractions? Most NCAA varsity programs are equivalency sports which means awards can be split into partial scholarships in any proportion up to the maximum allowed. For example, an NCAA Division I school can allocate a number of partial athletic scholarships equivalent to 11.7 full scholarships in any proportion among, say, 25 baseball players.
Full scholarships are relatively rare in equivalency sports. An additional caveat is that there is a top limit of the number of athletes that can be awarded even a partial scholarship in an equivalency sport - this limit is referred to as the maximum number of counters. For NCAA I baseball teams the maximum number of counters allowed is 27.