Over the summer, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) released a new rule stating that once an athlete graduates high school or turns 19, they receive a hard limit of five years of eligibility that must be completed in five years. Once those five years are up, they can no longer play college sports. The rule’s purpose is to get rid of the gray area of medical redshirt waivers and professional players finding loopholes to get back into college.
The rule has caused some turmoil over eligibility with it emerging into massive legal battles, the majority of which have come from college basketball. These lawsuits primarily are for the high school class of 2022. The class of 2022 just missed out on getting COVID-19 eligibility which the classes of 2021 and 2020 received. Starting next year, the following graduating classes will get an extra year of eligibility through the new rule.
It has been a back-and-forth duel in the courts this summer. The main case that covers the entire class is taking place in Colorado. Judge Charlotte Sweeney originally granted another year to the entire graduating year of 2022 but it ultimately was stayed, or placed on hold, by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. This resulted in any player not covered by a separate state case or lawsuit losing their extra year. This was a huge win for the NCAA. Notably, MJ Collins, who had just committed to Cincinnati, and Donavan Atwell, who had planned to return to Texas Tech, lost their fifth year. This lawsuit isn’t done yet, as it is expected to drag out over the next couple of months.
Following the class-wide blanket case in Colorado being stayed, similar results started to occur in other individual player cases in other states. While originally granted temporary injunctions or temporary restraining orders, they have now been stayed and will need another court date in the future. This happened in the Ohio and Tennessee cases.
The NCAA’s main argument against letting the class of 2022 play another year is that it will take away opportunities from incoming freshmen, and they are trying to enforce the rules as the governing body over college athletics. Some pundits think that the NCAA wants to create so much chaos that it will force the government to pass the Save College Sports Act sooner rather than later.
Andrew Amft-Reyes ‘18, a Lake Forest Academy alumnus who currently works in the Lake Forest Academy athletics department and is an AAU basketball coach for Full Package Athletics, weighed in on the chaos, saying, “Given how slow the NCAA is with enforcing things, it’s going to be a weird and very nontransparent process for people. And that’s where I think more lawsuits and more challenges are going to come in.” He also pointed out some of the benefits of the five-in-five rule. “You don’t have 27 and 28-year-olds who, let’s say, played in the NBA G League for a couple of years, coming back to school because they still have NCAA eligibility left, and it’s gonna kind of nullify that,” Amft-Reyes said. This will inevitably lead to freshmen getting more opportunities in college sports instead of older players.
Players, coaches and administrators are stuck in the same waiting game that Amft-Reyes described, waiting on a system that hasn’t caught up to the chaos it created. With the Colorado case still working through the appeals process and more state lawsuits on the way, there’s no clear timeline for when the class of 2022 will get a final answer on their lawsuits. Until then, every roster decision, every commitment and every fifth-year comeback attempt will keep happening under the notion that these athletes may not even be eligible.