There are way too many issues and complications with it. It isn’t worth the hassle of figuring out the logistical nightmare when 98% of the season was already complete and some seasons were already over. The seniors are just SOL. It’s not the world’s worst thing to have seniors miss the chance at 1-5 extra games.
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Exactly. This would undoubtedly result in the same thing happening next year in regards to seniors missing out on the tournament who wouldn’t have otherwise. It sucks that this happened, it’s a terrible way for your career to end. Sure it’s unfair, but granting another year would also be unfair to significantly larger group of players.
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You’d have to do it for every player. After all, every player that was going to make the tournament missed out, not just the seniors. That means scholarship limits would essentially be eliminated for 4 years. Also Pittsnoggled makes a good point. There’s not even a guarantee the teams that made the tournament this year were gonna make it again. So the “miss out on a once in a lifetime chance” argument doesn’t even hold. It’s a purely emotional argument.
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Somehow I ended up in a fight with a blue checkmark’d MSU account about this. 
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The tweet from Jeff Goodman is showing up as being in the future for me. It says it was posted at 4:58pm (it’s 2:12pm right now)
Yeah, that always happens on the site based on how it translates the time zone.
There will be so much media pressure to do it for the Winter Sports too. The NCAA are spineless cowards.
The odds of it happening are better than it doesn’t in my opinion.
The NCAA may be a lot of things but they aren’t completely clueless. I feel like they’ll see that this would create a lot more problems than it would solve.
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There’s pressure right now while the emotions are raw. It’ll die down.
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Report: NCAA gives spring athletes extra eligibility year; could do same for winter
I just don’t see it happening for seniors in winter sports. They basically got to play a whole season even though the best part of the season wasn’t played. The heartbreak for a lot of the seniors will eventually fade, emotion is just raw right now.
I’ve checked in with some athletes that are Seniors at U of M whose season started last month. The reply I got from one of them said there hasn’t been official word yet.
Also, frankly, I assume players like Simpson and Teske, if they are graduating in May, would prefer to just go play in Europe or take their crack at the NBA than play for free, especially with degree in hand.
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In my opinion, if I were able to craft a regulation, I would allow all spring sport student-athletes an extra year of eligibility – regardless of class (so FR, SO, JR, and SR all get one more year of eligibility) – AND next year only I would allow schools to go 20% over scholarship limit for that sport.
So baseball with an 11.7 scholarship limit, would be able to hand out 14.0 scholarships next season only and then back to 11.7 the following year OR softball with a 12 scholarship limit in D-I could hand out 14.4 next year, Track & Field with 12.6 normally would be allowed 15.1 … each school can decide from that pool if it wants to bring back any SRs for an additional year while having some flexibility to absorb the incoming FR class.
I’m leaning no toward winter sports, but I can be convinced…again with a similar cap of +20% on the sport’s scholarship limit. At many mid-major and low-major athletic departments, the school, quite frankly, might not have the $$$ to be able to hand out additional scholarships, so it might be a moot point … but I think a cap on how many scholarship above the norm a program can go next season provides some flexibility while also keeping a universal max on roster limits in place.
Why a % cap? Feel like that would be awful for teams that have a lot of seniors (and hence bring in a large recruiting class). Just have these “Corona Seniors” not count towards the cap
Then you wind up with teams with wildly different roster sizes which upsets competitive balance within conferences. Plus you end up with incoming FR or rising SO getting squeezed out of playing time they were promised and/or being groomed to slide into. Do you then release any incoming FR from a LOI? Allow any other player to transfer because next season’s playing time is cut into by a “COVID SR”? Make a blanket concession in one area and it creates a wide range of other unintended scenarios/consequences.
Create a 1-year system to account for great majority of cases while keeping much of the basic structure in place and limiting the unintended negative consequences.
Unfortunately, neither of them have a shot at the NBA. They’ll have to continue their careers in another country if they want to continue playing. Great players for Michigan, but they just aren’t NBA level talent and that is fine.
We’ll see how the whole extra year shakes out with the NCAA.
I think there’s a non-zero chance for Teske.
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Why? The NBA phased out players like him. He’s practically a poor man’s Roy Hibbert at the NBA level.
There’s a reason Teske was on draft boards at the beginning of the year. Obviously he doesn’t have the same stock now that he had then but it’s clearly not an impossibility for him.