We’ve all seen how the NCAA often hews more to the letter of the law than the spirit of the law when it comes to its regulations for college sports. A decade ago, I wrote about the case of Kolton Houston, an offensive lineman for the University of Georgia who the NCAA declared ineligible due to injections his doctor administered following shoulder surgery in high school. It took Houston three years to convince the NCAA to reinstate him.
The landscape of college athletics is littered with the stories of teams and individual players who paid the price for the NCAA’s tone-deaf strictness and refusal to see the human beings behind the regulations. The latest example of this came just a few weeks ago when the NCAA refused to grant postseason waivers to two teams who moved up from the Football Championship Series (FCS, formerly Division I-AA) to the Football Bowl Series (FBS, formerly Division I-A).
The process to fully transition from FCS to FBS takes two years under NCAA regulations, and James Madison University (JMU) and Jacksonville State University (JSU) are in that second year, which means that they won’t be full-fledged FBS teams until 2024….
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