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Weekly NFL Thread: Week 11

Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):

Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Green Bay Packers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Detroit Lions
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Tennessee Titans
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:05PM Atlanta Falcons @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-11-17 4:05PM Seattle Seahawks @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:25PM Cincinnati Bengals @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:25PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-11-17 8:20PM Indianapolis Colts @ New York Jets
Mon 2024-11-18 8:15PM Houston Texans @ Dallas Cowboys
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In the week 7 version of this thread Rov_Scam had a long effort post about college football https://www.themotte.org/post/1209/weekly-nfl-thread-week-7/259169?context=8#context

Towards the end of his thread he made a prediction that at some point the traditional NCAA eligibility limits of playing 4 years out of 5 years at school would come into question.

Well, 4 weeks later, we have movement on that.

Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia has sued the NCAA over it’s eligibility limitations.

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/42286584/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-suing-ncaa-eligibility-rules

So, it appears the basis of the lawsuit centers around the distinction between how years at a prep school and years at a junior college are counted.

Prep school years are basically counted as extra high school years, and don’t count against eligibility, junior college years are counted as college years, and do count against eligibility.

Pavia spent 2 years at New Mexico Military Institute, a junior college.

(Oddly, NMMI occasionally has prep schools on the schedule in 2018 and 2019 they played against Air Force Prep https://www.nmmiathletics.com/sports/fball/2019-20/schedule though the years I checked they never had more than 1 game against a prep school)

Anyway, as it stands now, it appears that this represents a fairly limited challenge to the eligibility structure, he doesn’t appear to be arguing that he should have open ended eligibility.

That said, the language the espn article quoted from the lawsuit, it’s not obvious why any of those arguments shouldn’t apply to open ended eligibility.

I’ll quote at some length:

“ "The JUCO Eligibility Limitation Bylaws neither promote competition nor benefit college athletes with respect to their impact on persons who attend junior colleges before transferring to NCAA schools," the lawsuit says. "These rules stifle the competition in the labor market for NCAA Division I football players, harming college athletes and degrading the quality of Division I football consumed by the public.

"These harms are contrary to Defendant's stated mission of promoting the well-being of college athletes and are the very ills federal antitrust law seeks to remedy. Pavia, and other former JUCO football players who are harmed by this illegal restraint, have a small window of time to compete in Division I football."

The lawsuit argues that the NCAA and its member institutions "have entered an illegal agreement to restrain and suppress competition" and are violating the federal Sherman Act.

The lawsuit says junior college transfers face eligibility restrictions that "are not placed on athletes who choose to delay entry to a Division I NCAA college to attend prep school, serve in the military, or even to compete professionally in another sport."

"Because Pavia cannot relive his short college career, the harm inflicted by the JUCO Eligibility Limitations Bylaws is irreparable and ongoing, and temporary and preliminary injunctive relief is necessary," the lawsuit says. "Pavia brings this action to put a stop to the unjustified anticompetitive restriction on universities who seek to compete for college athletes, and to restore freedom of economic opportunity for himself and other college football players."

—————-

If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, Welcome to Wrexham makes for an interesting companion piece.

If you’re not familiar with the premise Hollywood actors buy a lower level soccer club. And then it follows their process of trying to get promoted up the various levels of UK soccer.

There are a lot of interesting things going on with the show, but of the things that stood lower level UK soccer is stand alone from the highest level of UK soccer in a way that struck me as unusual for American sports.

What I mean by that is the Wrexham is decidedly not a developmental set up. Of the players they follow, several of them are in their mid 30s, really good player in the lower levels is sort of where they’re going to top out in their careers, one goalie they follow was a prominent Premier League player, who they bring in for 1 last go around at the very end of his career.

We don’t really have that here, in baseball if you’re still hanging around the minors as a 30 year old, it’s a matter of time before you’re put out to pasture in order to open up a spot for a younger prospect, even if you’re on of the better players at that level. The lower level is subservient to the higher level (that’s basically the premise of Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham).

Anyway, it seems unlikely that Diego Pavia will ever be a great NFL prospect, he probably could be a quite good 32 year old college QB, he probably won’t get that opportunity.

The crumbling away of the NCAA institutional rule making ability seems likely to continue.

A federal judge on Tuesday denied Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia's request for a temporary restraining order that would grant him another year of eligibility https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/42367444/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-denied-tro-request-added-eligibility

We don’t really have that here

Except we do. Minor league baseball teams have been controlled by their parent clubs since the 1920s, and exist specifically as developmental leagues for the majors. There's no similar arrangement between the NFL and college football. Given that the recent trends in college football have been toward maximizing the amount of money for all involved, there would be no real downside to colleges continuing to field older players if they thought it would make them more competitive. When you consider that most college players will never make the NFL, and that winning schools make more money, there are strong incentives toward a school keeping the best available players.