The NCAA is on the cusp of extending Division I athlete eligibility from four years of competition to five and essentially setting an age limit, just the latest development on a topic that has been a point of contention in college athletics for decades.

None other than Walter Camp, the “Father of American Football,” was three games into his seventh season — yes, seventh — when his playing career at Yale ended because of injury in 1882. Another football luminary, Amos Alonzo Stagg, was 27 when he wrapped up his fifth season at Yale in 1889.

Multisport great Jim Thorpe played football at Carlisle for the traditional four years, but he dropped out after his second season in 1908 to play minor league baseball and didn’t come back for his third season of college football until 1911.

‘Just part of the game’

Michael Oriard, who has authored four books on the rise of college football and was a Notre Dame offensive lineman in the 1960s, said he was surprised when his research showed so many examples of men playing into their late 20s and early 30s in the sport’s early years.

“When I was playing, it was really important that there not be physically more mature players out on the field beating the crap out of us younger guys,” he said. “I don’t know why a lot of them kept playing in each individual case, but a lot of really famous players did. It was just part of the game.”

The new age-based eligibility model, which could be approved by the NCAA Division I Council on Friday, would start the eligibility clock for a D-I athlete when they graduate from high school or turn 19, whichever comes first.

The change would address circumstances that led to the aging of rosters across all sports. First, the NCAA offered a one-time, one-year extension to athletes who had their 2020-21 season canceled or altered because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlimited transfers have incentivized coaches to replace departing athletes with older transfers instead of high school and junior college prospects. More recently, dozens of athletes have filed lawsuits seeking to extend their careers, often for financial reasons.

1855 Harvard-Yale

It would be easy to write it off as another symptom of out-of-control modern college athletics. Really, it’s nothing new.

Back in 1855, Yale protested when it discovered the coxswain on Harvard’s rowing team was an alumnus rather than a currently enrolled undergraduate. It was the first known eligibility dispute in college sports history, and there was no NCAA to settle the matter in those days.

Neither was there a governing body in the early days of college football, and the sport was a veritable free-for-all.

Mercenaries, known as “tramp players,” would show up on campuses and never take a class, let alone enroll. They would get paid by alumni or student groups to play a game, or several games, and then move on to the next school. Some were well into their 30s.

According to Camp’s biographer, Julie Des Jardins, it was Camp himself who, as Yale’s player-coach, proposed in 1882 to limit eligibility to five years. Yes, this was the same Camp who played six-plus seasons.

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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football