Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz discuss how Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar’s NCAA eligibility lawsuit could change the future of college sports if he’s granted another year of eligibility. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV.
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Video Transcript
That’s the difference here.
Trinidad Chambliss, if he is allowed to come back to Ole Miss, what that precedent will set will be that medical red shirts extend into JUCO.
And it just kind of emphasizes again what we already know, that the NCAA doesn’t have a whole lot of power in today’s college sports.
Joey Aguilar is a completely different story.
What he is arguing is that, “My time in JUCO does not count against my eligibility.”
So if it does go his way, whether it’s by the NCAA or by the state of Tennessee, I can only imagine that in the state of Tennessee, a Tennessee quarterback will probably, you know, get a ruling in his favor, that’ll, change college sports forever.
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That it’ll be that JUCO is essentially independent of college sports, and there’s a trickle-down effect to other sports here, too.
I look at college baseball, and I know that college sports rules aren’t made or changed because of college baseball.
It’s a football world, I understand that.
But I think about college baseball because it is such a heavy JUCO sport, that a lot of guys out of high school will go spend two years in JUCO and use that as a catapult to get to a big-time Power Four program.
We see it all the time.
There’s probably any given Power Four roster has several JUCO, JUCO guys scattered across it.
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Well, if the, if the NCAA rules or if the courts rule that JUCO years do not count against your college eligibility, I think that’ll completely change the trajectory of college sports.
At what point, you know, are, are college coaches gonna look at a young quarterback and say, “Hey, okay, I want you to go spend two years at a JUCO.
I want you to j- develop in two years at that JUCO, and then in two years, once you’re done, you’ll have a scholarship waiting for you here, and then you’ll have four years of eligibility left”?
It’ll almost be like I The way that I see this going, almost like a minor league and a major league.
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the, the, quote-unquote, “major league” head football coach will scout a player and say, “Go spend two years here and develop, and then we’ll bring you up to the, quote-unquote, ‘big leagues’ whenever you’re ready.”
And it won’t matter, ’cause it won’t count against his eligibility.
That’ll completely change college sports.
For the better or the worse, I don’t really know, but it’ll change it for sure.
Well, I, I mean, look, Caroline, my I don’t have kids.
My mind was rocked a couple of years ago, doing some work with us here at Yahoo, and with On3, regarding some of the, high school k- high school football prospects.
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I, honestly, I’m the first to admit, was unaware that it’s become very common for parents to hold their kids back one year at some point in their middle school or high school so that they’re bigger and they can compete better when they get to the- Yeah … age that they’re competing in high school.
I j- I just didn’t know that existed.
So now think about the world that we live in, where you’re holding your kid back one year in high school.
You’re literally gonna make them repeat a grade because that helps them size-wise.
It’s, again, this is a very common practice.
Now all of a sudden you can do that, and you’ll be able to send your kid to JUCO for two years, and then if a college program is smart, they could also red shirt the first year of your actual four years of eligibility.
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You could start getting to a situation where by the time somebody’s playing their last year of college football eligibility, they are seven years removed from high school.
That’s just the simple math: the two years at JUCO, one year red shirt, then four years of being out there in the streets, right?
So that gives you seven years on top of you were held back one year in high school.
So you’ve got kids now that are coming out of high school that are 19.
That means, do the math, boom, boom, boom, you’re gonna have a, a standard practice of 26-year-olds playing college football.
