This comes to us via ESPN's Mitch Sherman on the College Football recruiting blog. Here's the link to the New Eligibility standards. But I'll give you the readers digest below.

The new requirements go into effect in 2016, that is current 8th graders who will be entering their freshman year of high school in the fall. , and the most drastic change is:

Current initial-eligibility standards require entering freshmen to graduate high school with 16 core courses passed and a minimum 2.0 GPA matched with an ACT or SAT score on a sliding scale.

The 2016 standards mandate the same 16 core courses but stipulate that 10 must be completed by the start of the student's senior year of high school and that all 16 are finished in four years. So effectively say goodbye to the practice popular in basketball of reclassifying to enjoy a fifth year of high school.

And the minimum GPA jumps to 2.3.

More after the jump.

The biggest thing to come out of this is the addition of the "Academic Redshirt." Basically an Academic Redshirt is the same idea as the old Prop 48/16 partial qualifiers with the big difference being that players DO NOT lose a year of eligibility. Academic Redshirts can still practice with the team, they just cannot play during games. For those wondering the Academic Redshirt DOES count against the scholarship count, and the player would play the next year as a redshirt freshman.

But that's not the most eye popping nugget of information to come out of this:

A survey conducted by the NCAA indicated that of all freshmen football players to enroll at Division I schools last fall, approximately 40 percent would have failed to meet the 2016 requirements.

Now obviously that's taking a new standard and retroactively applying it to current players, I really don't think we can expect 40% of D1 players to be Academic Redshirts in 2016, but does anybody see the potential irony of an SEC player being called an "Academic" Redshirt?

They don't go on to say if a survey was done for basketball players, but it makes you wonder, will UCONN ever be able to field a team? (I kid, I kid)

If you assume none of the schools are cheating or operating in the grey area in recruiting. It does do a lot to balance out recruiting for schools with tougher academics. The argument that we didn't get kid XYZ because of academic reasons no longer rings as true as it once did.