Oklahoma State redshirt senior Michael Cobbins will miss the Cowboys’ opening three games of the regular season as penance for playing in two non-conference regular season games during his true freshman season. Cobbins played in a combined five minutes against Houston Baptist and Nicholls State during the 2010-11 season, prior to sitting out the remainder of the year as a medical redshirt. Unfortunately for Cobbins, NCAA rules require that a player must sit out two competitions for each game in which he appeared during his redshirt season (excluding scrimmages and exhibition games for freshmen). After Wisconsin’s Duje Dukan was able to count a closed scrimmage and an exhibition game toward his required total in a similar situation, Oklahoma State asked the NCAA to count its exhibition game against Missouri Western as one of the games Cobbins was required to miss. That request was granted late last week, and as a result, Cobbins sat out the Cowboys’ Saturday exhibition. Still, as a result of playing those 300 ticks of the clock some four years ago, the key frontcourt contributor will be unavailable for the Cowboys’ first three games of the 2014-15 campaign.
Cobbins missed the majority of the 2013-14 season with an Achilles injury. (Michael Wyke/Tulsa World)
While the two-for-one rule seems somewhat arbitrary, Oklahoma State is lucky to have Cobbins available at all this season. According to NCAA rules, a single second of action in a regular season game is sufficient to cost a player a full year of eligibility. The requirement is aimed at preventing a coach from using a potential redshirted player in a substantial number of games by requiring the player to miss a substantially larger number of games in the future. This removes the incentive for a coach to burn a good portion of a player’s season of eligibility by effectively trying him out at the beginning of a season to see how he performs — the NCAA is forcing coaches to make redshirt decisions on players sooner than later.
Though the rule is effective in creating that deterrent, it is unlikely to have much of an effect on Oklahoma State in this instance. Ford was aware that Cobbins would be required to miss four games this season and he scheduled accordingly, “We thought he wasn’t going to play the first four games. That’s the reason we scheduled four games before Las Vegas, the way we’ve done it. I would never ever schedule four games in a matter of seven days. But we had to do that to get those out of the way.” Missing Cobbins in the frontcourt is unlikely to have any impact on the Cowboys during those games as our own Brian Goodman noted in his season preview: “The Pokes warm up with gimmes against Southeastern Louisiana, Prairie View, D-II Northwestern Oklahoma State and Milwaukee before heading west to Las Vegas.”
In the end, the NCAA rule is designed to preserve the integrity of the redshirt and is something that coaches can easily adjust to because they should be aware that the ruling is coming. The real winner here is Oklahoma State, which is likely to survive the opening several games of the season and get a healthy and rested Cobbins back in time to face Milwaukee before heading to Las Vegas for its match-up with Oregon State.