We Done With the 7th-Year College Players?

Survey says: Not quite

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Toward the end of the NCAA’s regular season, the head football coach at Wisconsin had — I don’t want to call it an epiphany, but he had a moment.

The coach, Luke Fickell (he’s really good), was getting his team ready to play Minnesota. The Badgers-Gophers annual rivalry is called the Border Battle, and they play for Paul Bunyan’s Axe. Wisconsin was still grinding for bowl positioning at the time, etc. etc. The game mattered plenty.

But Fickell couldn’t help himself; he got momentarily sidetracked on a nonessential feature of the matchup. One of Minnesota’s players, it turns out, was a seventh-year guy.

And that realization, for some reason, brought Fickell up a little short.

“This world today, I think we’ve still got a couple more years left of not knowing how old (players are) or what guys have left in the tank based on how many years of experience,” the coach said. “I just saw Minnesota’s got a seventh-year guy, and I just saw a Utah quarterback is saying he’s coming back for a seventh year.

“Is this still college football? I don’t know. I’m not sure it was meant to be six years, seven years. There’s a lot of those things still hanging.”

Okay.

First of all, “This world today”?

But anyway, yes, Coach, the rosters of many a college athletic program are still trying to clear traffic from the 2020 Covid season, when every player involved in most sports (but not all) was given a full year’s waiver.

Combine that with the usual things that happen to athletes — straight-up redshirt seasons, injury-related medical redshirts — and you wind up with, actually, quite a few college players who can both raise a full family and continue to compete at the NCAA level.

And look: Some of ‘em are getting serious NIL money. Would you end that gravy train early, or would you hang out in the dining car until they told you that your stop had finally arrived?

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I mention all this because the quarterback at Oklahoma State, Alan Bowman, announced on Thursday that he had been granted a seventh year of eligibility by the NCAA and will return to guide the Cowboys in 2024. (That’s not Bowman in the photo; that’s an old guy who played college ball a few years ago.) I normally wouldn’t care, because it’s Oklahoma State, but in this case I started wondering how rare were the circumstances that could lead to such a thing as a fully brain-developed adult still playing the college game.

Answer: Not that rare.

We are indeed in a jagged period of college athletics. The NCAA, inept in most ways a lot of the time, had almost no idea what to do with the Covid year, and at some point its executives just punted the question and said, “Most of you can stay another year.” It was a humane decision in many respects, and this certainly was not a foreseeable circumstance, but let’s not confuse the outcome with leadership. The NCAA was a deer in the headlights.

So — every athlete in many, many sports immediately had the option to become a super-senior. This wrecked scholarship plans at hundreds if not thousands of individual programs, where coaches already have to juggle insanely inadequate awards and count on a certain percentage of athletes to, you know, leave on time. (My biased favorite in this category: college baseball, where no more than 11.7 scholarships’ worth of money can be committed at any given moment, for a roster of 35 to 38 players.)

From the athletes’ perspective, though, it’s only fair — and I am on the side of the athletes. Either way, that is how the Minnesota football player who caught Luke Fickell’s attention late last fall came to be in a seventh-year situation himself. It’s not something he was rooting for.

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Chris Autman-Bell, pictured above, is the Gopher in question. Autman-Bell spent all seven of his NCAA eligible years at Minnesota. He never entered the transfer portal or switched from FBS to FCS or anything like it. He had a redshirt year in 2017, played every game in 2018, became a breakout star receiver in 2019, then led the Gophers in catches during their Covid-abbreviated 2020 run. (They played barely half their schedule.)

In 2021, he led the team in catches, receiving yards and touchdowns.

In 2022, Autman-Bell wrecked his knee three games in, and it was that medical redshirt that allowed him to try again in 2023. It was not a storybook ending. Autman-Bell did appear in nine games, a victory of sorts, but he was extremely limited in his comeback from the injury. He made only six catches all year.

Autman-Bell is 24 years old, not 50 like Luke Fickell. He’s also not that unusual. The Utah quarterback that Fickell referenced is Cam Rising; Rising is returning in 2024 because he tore his ACL in last year’s Rose Bowl against Penn State, and missed all of 2023.

Alan Bowman, at Oklahoma State, found out this week that he’s getting a do-over from his 2019 season at Texas Tech, which ended after three games because of injury. Bowman spent three years at Tech and two at Michigan, and now he’ll finish with two in Stillwater. It sounds weird, but it is very college sports circa 2024.

And none of this is to pick on Luke Fickell, really. But let’s face it: Most college coaches live in a Peter Pan world, where athletes exist only from about ages 18 to 21. These coaches don’t walk the campus, because nobody ever tells them to. They’d have no idea, for example, that about a third of all college students in the U.S. are 25 or older — roughly 7 million oldsters taking classes.

“Is this still college football?” Fickell asked. You should know, Coach: The quarterback you recruited as your starter for 2023, Tanner Mordecai, was a super-super-senior with three years at Oklahoma and two at SMU.