Christian Scott and Brandon Collins won't be playing this year because the NCAA says they haven't made enough progress towards their degrees.
Mack Brown released a statement last night confirming the news.
“We’re disappointed for Brandon and Christian that they won’t be able to play this season, but they will continue to practice with the team and work towards earning their degrees, which is the ultimate goal,” Mack Brown said. “They both have two years of eligibility remaining so they’ll help us in practice this year and then get back to competing for playing time in the spring.”
They can still practice with the team, and Collins will be able to redshirt. Scott, however, just blew a year of eligibility.
So how does this happen? How do you lose two potential starters? First and foremost, the players didn't do their work. But they're also not getting much help from the football academic support staff. How hard is it to make sure that a player is doing his work?
Remember when the baseball team lost Sam Lecure and the basketball team lost PJ Tucker to academics in the same year? Both Augie Garrido and Rick Barnes were caught by surprise and pissed off. So they both made changes to their support staff, and there haven't been any problems since.
The football team didn't make any changes at the time, but less than a week after they officially announced that Scott, Collins and Deon Beasley were in trouble they issued another press release about their new academic counselor, Curtis Jones. Coincidence? No.
We'll see if there are any other changes made going forward.