Purdue Football: The Redshirt is No More – How the new NCAA Eligibility Rule Affects Purdue Football.

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Boston, MA - September 20: NCAA president and former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker is interviewed by Boston Globe Sports writer Chris Gasper at the Globe Summit 2023. (Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) | Boston Globe via Getty Images

The NCAA (remember, the NCAA is the name of the club the school presidents came up with to try to standardize rules across sports…the NCAA is the schools, and the schools are the NCAA) put out an update to its eligibility requirements this morning, moving to a 5-year post-high school graduation model. You can find the official NCAA announcement here.

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I am here to talk about what I think this means for Purdue football moving forward in terms of recruiting and on-field performance (Don’t worry, I’ll talk about basketball later. I’m still gathering my thoughts.) Luckily, here at Hammer and Rails, we have two Drews (technically a Drew and an Andrew, but close enough). If you’re looking for clarity on what this means for players currently on the roster, or other such legal wranglings, I will point you to the bottom of this article, where Andrew is holding court and getting into the weeds; I’m more of a big-picture guy. Details aren’t my thing.

Football

I’ll give you the easy answer first, and then I’ll wade into some wild speculation on the possible future implications.

It doesn’t change much for Purdue.

The most likely scenario is that Barry Odom will recruit the high school players he wants. He’ll get them into the program, treat their first year on campus as a de facto redshirt, and continue building the program the way he knows how to build a program. The reality is that any first-year Purdue player who can play a role on the team does so and doesn’t redshirt anyway. The guys who aren’t ready need the year to get ready anyway.

The boring answer tends to be the correct answer in college athletics. There is too much money on the line to play mad scientist with a set of amorphous rules that no one seems to think exist anyway. If, however, someone like me, who has exactly zero dollars riding on the success of the Purdue football team, can play pretend football coach on the internet.

The first thing I would do is change my recruiting pitch and maybe some of my recruiting targets, because we’re going big game hunting with some new ammunition.

Math, as always, is Purdue’s best friend in this argument. Players now have five years to maximize their value. Play it right, and you’re sitting pretty after those five years because only 1.6% of the 2027 recruiting class will be drafted into the NFL.

If the goal is to maximize your value in college, is sitting on the bench at Ohio State behind entrenched high-level starters the best way to do that?

Teams don’t want to buy lottery picks in the portal; they want proven on-field production. They want to be able to say, “This player is worth ‘x’ amount of money because I know they can perform at ‘x’ level in college football games.”

Here’s My Pitch to Elite Recruits

Come to Purdue, and we’ll put you on the field in your first year. If you ball out as a freshman and want to head to higher-profile pastures, best of luck. Please leave us a recommendation with your friends as an easy place to playearly.

However, if you ball out in your first year, we’re going to put together a package that’s hard to turn down. Our money spends just as well as Ohio State’s, and we’re not spreading it nearly as thin.

Basically: Play here for two seasons and establish yourself as one of the best players at your position because you’re on the field, instead of on the sidelines. You can not only have your pick of schools, but you’ll have a 1-way trip to the top of any depth chart in the country…or you could stay at Purdue and get a top-level Big 10 paycheck for as long as you desire.

I’m going to keep picking on Ohio State because they have an embarrassing hoard of riches in Columbus. They have 4* kids buried on their roster who are burning several precious seasons of earnings waiting for an opportunity to compete for a spot on the depth chart. Even worse, you might fight your way to the top of the mountain only to see the Buckeyes bring in a generational 5* first-year guy or a portal player who was accumulating experience on the actual field while you were fighting it out on the practice field. I can read the headlines now: “Can Ohio State risk starting an unproven 3rd year player? If he were good enough to play at Ohio State, why wasn’t he on the field sooner?”

My theory is that the longer you stay on a roster, and that’s any roster, without on-field production, the more your value declines. Let’s take the top player from Indiana in the 2024 class, Mylan Graham, as an example (if there is more to his story, I don’t care; this is a theoretical example, not a case study).

Graham was a 4*(96.7) wide receiver out of New Haven, Indiana. He was considered the 39th overall player in his class and the 9th best wide receiver. He could have played anywhere, but he chose to attend the professional wide-receiver factory in Columbus.

As a first-year player in 2024 for Ryan Day, he played in 4 games and didn’t record any stats. As a second-year player in 2025, he pulled down 6 receptions for 93 yards, all in garbage time. He entered the portal in 2026, and I’m going to assume Notre Dame scooped him up at a bargain bin discount. According to Rivals, Graham went from being the 39th-best player in his high school class to the 110th-best player and the 24th-best player in the portal.

Did he get worse over the last two seasons?

Probably not, but unfortunately for Graham, I think a couple of NFL teams would have agreed to a straight-up wide receiver room swap with the Buckeyes over the last two seasons.

Now, I need everyone to remember that this is only hypothetical moving forward.

Imagine, for a moment, that Purdue wasn’t a monument to football dysfunction in 2024. Which career path makes Graham more money over his 5-year window?

Molder on the bench at Ohio State for two seasons and then hope to make up for lost time as a third-year receiver coming into a talented Notre Dame locker room with no resume other than “was good in high school three years ago.” I highly doubt Ryan Day made any last-second overtures to retain the services of a little-used slot receiver, regardless of his potential. Day can’t throw a rock during practice without hitting a player like Graham. He’s a great player, in theory, but so is everyone else on the Buckeye roster.

or

Start your first two seasons at Purdue, rack up numbers against Big 10 defenses, and then hit the open market. He might still end up at Notre Dame in his third year, but he would be negotiating from a significant position of strength.

“You call that money? I could go back to West Lafayette and get Big 10 WR1 money right now. They are on the other line begging me to come back.” Do you know how much money I made on merch alone last season? My “Graham’s the Man” shirt is killing it in the Purdue N.I.L. store, and every car dealership in the area is throwing keys at me for a chance to put my face on their billboard.

If this new era of college football is all about the money, I think Purdue has a compelling argument to make to some talent that would otherwise be considered out of its reach.

Is this a strategy I would stake my multi-million-dollar career to, with no data showing it works? Probably not, but maybe I can pick out one or two players from each class to really put the press on using this strategy. I see no harm in giving it a shot; you’ve got to sell what you have, and Purdue will always have a couple of places on every roster that could use a talent upgrade. This seems like an interesting way to fill those holes while still developing other players on the roster.

Maybe some of them eventually decide to stick around for the long haul.

I’ll have more to say about this over the summer, but I’m going to kick it over to Ledman now.

What Does This All Mean?

Andrew here. Don’t call me Drew. Not just because I don’t go by Drew, but because it just gets confusing with Drew around here. Now, these changes are still in their infant stages and it’s important to note that they just became final today when the NCAA meeting was completed so there’s still a lot of things in flux. What things you ask? Well, just look at this:

Lawsuits in five different states seeking to allow more than 50 players to play a 5th season in college basketball. As noted by others on Twitter, the players who graduated in 2026 would be the first class without a Covid consideration for an additional year and also without the five in five rule. Sort of the forgotten middle child of college classes. Now it looks like the NCAA is going to have yet another lawsuit on their hands. Honestly, when I was graduating from law school I should’ve applied to work for the NCAA because there’s certainly no shortage of work. If I’m the NCAA it’s almost not worth it to fight this lawsuit. Let the players who want play an extra year and move on with this new eligibility policy. You’re going to cost yourself time, money, and continued bad headlines if you fight this one. Though I guess if you’re the NCAA you’re used to bad headlines.

There are exemptions to this new policy that I believe deserve to be spelled out. This is directly from the NCAA website:

The Cabinet defined the exceptions that could delay or pause an individual’s period of eligibility under the age-based rules, which include pregnancy, active-duty military service and official religious missions. These exceptions will only be available if the student-athlete does not participate in organized competition for the duration of the exception.

Now, to my knowledge there are no players on the Purdue roster in either football, basketball, or volleyball that fall into these categories. However, for basketball there is Jamyn Sondrup who is going on a Mormon mission that is set to last for two years. Now that he’s coming into Purdue after the implementation of this rule his religious exemption should prevent any eligibility problems for the young man as he comes into Purdue for the 2028-2029 season.

Now, with those exemptions spelled out the NCAA claims that this new policy will end the need for decisions on waivers, clock extensions, hardship waivers. As we’ve seen over the last few years there have seemed to be no rules for eligibility and if you wanted an extra year and sued to get it you’d probably get it. The joke on Twitter has been that some of these guys didn’t need an extra year, they needed a job application as they sought to play in their seventh seasons. I think this is a change for the good. It takes so much of the human element out of it because let’s be honest, no one trusts the NCAA. The less you have an individual hand on the scale perhaps the better for the credibility of the organization.

So, long story long, we just don’t know all of the implications of this. The lawsuits will play a hand of course in how this new policy plays out so it may change in the coming months but for now that’s what we know. We will keep an eye on this as we move forward.

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