Quote:
Originally Posted by Ksyrup
Why? They did the same for spring athletes a few months ago.
If this plays out the way it did in the spring, who this really screws is HS juniors/seniors who will be scrambling to re-assess their commitments given the potential for an extra class of players on the roster/depth chart of the team they expected to join.
This happened in softball following the extra year of eligibility from the spring, where schools brought back their entire senior class plus had a signed class of freshmen coming in. That left the rising sophomores/juniors in a bad spot and a number of teams saw several players transfer out rather than compete with seniors who they thought were going to be gone.
But longer-term, the problem with 5 years of players on the roster is that after the 1st year, all of those roster spots are going to count against the scholarship cap, so you've got limited scholarships to offer to current HS players. There will be a lot of movement both in commitments and in current players in the "sandwich classes."
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So I actually had to go back and do some more homework on this. The last I had seen they hadn't officially approved expanded rosters for spring sports yet and baseball had a hard cap of 35 players. The extra year of eligibility has caused all sorts of problems and doing so without expanded rosters would be an even larger cluster.
My understanding, and I do admit I could be reading this wrong, is that the spring sport athletes get an extra year and it's up to the school to honor that scholarship. Seniors (or juco sophomores) that are returning don't count again the 35 player cap for baseball. If the school declines to honor a scholarship for the extra year and the player decides to try to play somewhere else then he counts against the 35 man roster cap. That's why I've seen jucos flooded with sophomores looking for a place to play.
So I guess it's not the worst possible decision but one that's created a hell of a mess for schools and players.