End of an era: Final Four loaded with 5th-year seniors

Alijah Martin still cringes at the memory of his freshman season at Florida Atlantic, played amid empty arenas, nose-swab testing and bubble protocols as the sporting world tried to operate in a COVID-19 world.

“You do all this practice the week of the game, you get to the game and that team is sick,” Martin said. “So now you don’t have a game, you’re not playing, you’re not getting better, you’re not getting film.”

Yet Martin could look back with appreciation, too. After all, he was standing Friday in Florida’s busy Alamodome locker room as a fifth-year guard for a Gators team in the Final Four. The NCAA granted that year for Martin and others across the country who competed during those most unusual of times in the 2020-21 season, which proved to be landscape-altering change to the core structure of college athletics with players competing just four years.

But those “COVID years” have largely cycled out of men’s and women’s college basketball this season, so the semifinals Saturday and title game Monday night will mark a farewell of sorts for a time that has kept players like Martin, Auburn star Johni Broome, Baylor’s LJ Cryer, and Duke’s graduate-transfer duo of Sion James and Mason Gillis around the college game longer than usual.

Broome understands the journey well. His first year at Morehead State ended with a first-round loss to West Virginia in the bubbled 2021 NCAA Tournament.

They’re all elder statesmen now, their college careers down to two games at best depending on the outcomes of Saturday’s games.

“I think it’s good having guys stay,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “I think there’s a limit to it, though. I think we’re getting to a place here were now four or five years is enough. For us, we have been able to take advantage of it, too. Having Mason Gillis has been an awesome thing for us.”

The availability of veteran talent through the transfer portal has offered an enticing pipeline to veteran talent for coaches, who have seen the value of getting older rather than developing freshmen who might opt to transfer out anyway.

According to NCAA data, the average experience level for Division I men’s players stood at 2.41 years for 2018-19, the last full season untouched by the pandemic. It had risen to 2.62 years for 2024-25. Yet that data is based on a four-year scale, meaning it doesn’t tell the full story on how players in fifth years or beyond would drive that figure even higher.

It certainly seems to have played a role in the fact that this year marks only the second all-chalk set of 1-seeds at the Final Four, the other coming in 2008. And for the second straight year, each of the Final Four teams will have at least one fifth-year starter.

By Monday night, though, those journeys will be over. So, too, will the fifth-year era. And it’s difficult to imagine a time when anything like it — an en masse granting of extra eligibility — could happen again.