The extra year of eligibility afforded to college athletes due to the COVID-19 pandemic-impacted 2020–21 season has caused plenty of longevity records to be broken, but one well-traveled men’s college basketball player may take the cake.
Dejuan Clayton, who spent the 2022–23 season at Cal, has entered the transfer portal in pursuit of an eighth season of college basketball, per Travis Branham of 247Sports. Clayton spent the first five years of his collegiate career at Coppin State, then played the 2021–22 season at Hartford before spending last season at Cal.
He’d join a very small group of college athletes to play for eight years and appears to be the first basketball player ever to play in eight different seasons, assuming he finds a landing spot for the 2023–24 season. East Tennessee State linebacker Jared Folks was the first college athlete to play for eight years (2014–2021), but had two seasons without participating in a game.
Clayton, a Maryland native, graduated from high school in 2016, the same class as the likes of Jayson Tatum, Lonzo Ball and De’Aaron Fox. He picked Coppin State over an offer from Morgan State, per Verbal Commits, and started 23 games as a freshman, averaging better than 12 points per game. Coach Michael Grant was fired after his freshman season, but Clayton stayed to play for new coach and Maryland basketball legend Juan Dixon. He suffered a season-ending injury after six games as a sophomore in 2017–18, the first of his three medical redshirt seasons.
Clayton then returned to full health and put together back-to-back all-MEAC seasons in 2018–19 and 2019–20, graduating from Coppin State in the spring of 2020 with a degree in social science. He decided to return to Coppin for what would have been his fourth and final season of eligibility in the 2020–21 season, and that’s where things go off the rails. He played in 16 games that season, but 2020–21 didn’t count towards any player’s eligibility, so Clayton hit the transfer portal that spring to play another year.
He picked a Hartford program fresh off a trip to the NCAA tournament in 2021, but suffered a shoulder injury after just two games that caused him to miss the remainder of the season. That season became the second medical redshirt. With Hartford announcing plans to transition down to Division III and transitioning to D-I independent status for 2022–23, Clayton entered the transfer portal again and resurfaced at Cal. He missed the season’s first 13 games with an injury, then suited up in nine games before being shut down for the season with an undisclosed illness. But by playing in fewer than 10 games and under 30% of Cal’s games, he is eligible for yet another medical redshirt assuming he is cleared by the NCAA.
In all, Clayton will have played for three different schools in three different seasons since 2020 without his eligibility advancing because of the injuries and the 2020–21 not counting. In that time, he has worked towards a graduate degree in business administration at Cal and will have an opportunity to continue his studies at wherever he lands next. He turns 26 in May.
College basketball fans had plenty of fun with Clayton’s announcement.
forget a job application, we gotta go a step further for this guy https://t.co/teK3nHV2sU pic.twitter.com/au6WE0p1Kx
— The Big Game Boomer (@LilBonaX) April 27, 2023
Clayton’s first game happened when Patrick Mahomes was still playing at Texas Tech and Obama was still president. https://t.co/Ca3NWMOjqU
— Emory Lyda (@emorylyda41) April 27, 2023
The new Perry Ellis https://t.co/NvBYCPbJbJ
— Brandon Lloyd (@blloyd8298) April 27, 2023
Here’s to hoping Clayton can find a landing spot for a healthy finish to his historically-long college career.
