Meet Cam McCormick, college football’s ninth-year wonder
Due to a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and a brutal string of injuries, the Miami tight end has been in college almost a decade. Now, the road is coming to an end
In the 2011 science fiction film “In Time,” characters inhabit a futuristic, dystopian society in which every individual has a clock on their arm counting down how long they have to live. Once it hits zero, the person dies instantly.
It’s an interesting, albeit unsettling, premise for a movie. In college football, there’s thankfully a decidedly less morbid clock by which every player has to abide.
The thousands of players who begin their FBS football careers annually enter college with an understood, in-fine-print timeline. They have four seasons of playing eligibility that they can complete over a period of five calendar years. Most commonly, that extra, non-playing year is a redshirt, a time in which a player can recover from some kind of injury or use those 12 months to prepare for the physical rigors of the sport by bulking up a bit.
There are, of course, exceptions. Not everyone’s career fits neatly into that five-year-old box. In some instances, players have particularly shitty luck and miss most of, if not the entirety of, a season with an injury. Should that occur, they can file for a waiver from the NCAA for an additional year of eligibility, one that even some of the more heartless bureaucrats in Indianapolis don’t regularly deny.
As it did for so many other aspects of American life, the COVID-19 pandemic changed that. College athletes who were in school at that time were granted an extra year of eligibility, meaning that those with an ill-fated injury history saw their college stays extended that much more.
Four years removed from the height of the pandemic, the effects of it are still evident in college football. BYU’s Gerry Bohanon, Oklahoma’s Casey Thompson, Michigan’s Jack Tuttle, Louisville’s Tyler Shough, Oklahoma State’s Alan Bowman and Utah’s Cam Rising are all entering their seventh season. All six of them were part of a 2018 quarterback recruiting class that was headlined by Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields, both of whom are about to begin their fourth seasons in the NFL.
But even among that athletically geriatric bunch, nobody quite compares to Cam McCormick.
How a four-year career becomes a nine-year one
On Saturday, when his Miami team faces off against in-state rival Florida, McCormick will be starting his ninth season of college football. Yes, you read that correctly.
If that nearly decade-long career seems like a rarity, it’s because it is.
McCormick is believed to be the first-ever athlete to ever be approved for a ninth year of eligibility by the NCAA. Former East Tennessee State Jared Folks was the NCAA’s first eighth-year player when he took part in his final college season in 2021. More recently, NC State wide receiver Bradley Rozner and Northern Illinois linebacker Kyle Pugh, who last played in the 2023 and 2022 seasons, respectively, also made it to their eighth seasons before getting on with their life’s work.
McCormick, however, has reached what was long presumed to be an unattainable distinction.
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