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If you’re a fairly casual college basketball fan, there’s a very good chance you’ve found yourself watching a game and were surprised to learn it featured a player who you could’ve sworn had already exhausted their eligibility a couple of years prior.
Plenty of people felt that way about Kansas big man Perry Ellis, who only played four seasons despite the fact that it felt like he was with the program for twice as long. There was also fellow Jayhawk Mitch Lightfoot, who capped off his tenure in Lawrence as a sixth-year senior in 2022.
However, the latter has nothing on another player who will be 26 years old when the 2023 campaign kicks off and is gearing up for what will technically be his eighth year at the college level.
It’s pretty likely you’re not intimately familiar with Seth Towns, a forward hailing from Columbus, Ohio who committed to play for Harvard all the way back in 2015.
Towns got off to a promising start and was named Ivy League Player of the Year following a standout sophomore campaign. Unfortunately, knee issues forced him to sit out the next two seasons, and he ultimately transferred to Ohio State in 2020.
A back injury forced Towns to miss what would have been his second year with the Buckeyes, and according to ESPN, he’s gearing up for yet another change of scenery after entering the transfer portal.
College basketball has boasted a handful of seventh-year seniors thanks in no small part to the COVID-19 waiver anyone who was enrolled at the start of the pandemic has been able to take advantage of, but Towns is on the verge of joining a very small group of people who can technically say they were a student-athlete for eight years (including another active basketball player).
Eat your heart out, Van Wilder.