Mailbag question: Regarding the red-shirt rule

Mailbag question: Regarding the red-shirt rule

Another reader on another message board site asked an interesting question that was also on my mind.

What are the rules on red-shirting players for football? I believe in basketball you can play up to a point and then be red-shirted, but in football it seems if you play at all you burn the red-shirt, unless you are injured and you can apply for a medical red shirt. I am not clear on these things, and I would also be interested in who are the players that are eligible for a red-shirt thus far?

Thanks,

Hal E.

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Thanks for the question.

The description below is word for word from the NCAA guidelines.

The term "redshirt" is used to describe a student-athlete who does not participate in competition in a sport for an entire academic year. If you do not compete in a sport the entire academic year, you have not used a season of competition. For example, if you are a qualifier, and you attend a four-year college your freshman year, and you practice but do not compete against outside competition, you would still have the next four years to play four seasons of competition.

Each student is allowed no more than four seasons of competition per sport. If you were not a qualifier, you may have fewer seasons of competition available to you. You should know that NCAA rules indicate that any competition, regardless of time, during a season counts as one of your seasons of competition in that sport. It does not matter how long you were involved in a particular competition (for example, one play in a football game, one point in a volleyball match); you will be charged with one season of competition.

Yes there are other things that can contribute to a determination concerning if a player can be red-shirted while playing for a short time, such as medical redshirt or hardship in which a player needs to leave a school to be closer to home for family reasons. Of course, there are rules on top of rules and as readers can imagine it is hard to lay everything out here in a short article, but hopefully the above information/answer will help. If you ever get a chance to visit the NCAA site and actually look at some of the manuals of the rules you will see how vast the manuals are and how difficult to understand/interpret at some points.

We believe that in most cases the best way of keeping track is if a player steps on the field he is mainly counted for that year as participating unless the coach says otherwise. Sometimes at the end of the year coaches will send in the proper forms to see if a player can receive that year of eligibility back depending on certain circumstances.

Hopefully we did not make you more confused.

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Written by CoachBt and ErocWolverine