NCAA providing pathway for automatic eligibility for college freshman

The NCAA is planning to provide flexibility for incoming students athletes, all of which have academic requirements that needed to be met prior to starting their collegiate careers.

Now, the NCAA, because of the coronavirus pandemic that is drastically impacting the United States, is providing a pathway for the athletes to meet the association’s “initial-eligibility” requirements.

Student athletes will now be able to gain automatic eligibility waivers because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zagsblog’s Adam Zagoria dove deeper into what that means for incoming student athletes and how those requirements are being changed.

“Instead of having to have a minimum GPA of 2.3 along with a corresponding standardized test score, students entering college for the 2020-21 year now just need to have the minimum GPA as well as meet the core-course progression requirement,” Zagoria wrote.

This will impact Kentucky in multiple ways, but it may start with the team’s up-and-coming football program, a program with one of their best recruiting classes in university history inbound in the fall.

In addition, this will help ensure the basketball team’s entire No. 1 recruiting class will be eligible next season.

This process will also likely lead to more 2021 kids opting to reclassify into 2020 since the academic requirements for them to do so just got easier.

“That will speed up a lot of these reclass kids,” a source told Zagoria as well.

That will impact the college’s men’s basketball plans, as several of the top recruits in classes a year away opt to move up a class and get themselves one year closer to the NBA Draft.