Less than 24 hours after the NCAA Division I Cabinet approved a monumental change in eligibility rules, a group of 15 college basketball players filed a lawsuit in an Ohio state court claiming the new age-based model unfairly shuts them out of further competition.
The NCAA will now allow athletes five seasons of competition over a five-year period that begins with their full-time enrollment or the academic year following their 19th birthday, whichever
occurs first. The move will all but eliminate waivers or redshirt years for extended eligibility except for religious missions, pregnancy or active-duty military service. No longer will extensions be considered for athletes who are injured.
Athletes whose eligibility expired by spring 2026 under the traditional model — four years of competition over five years — will not be allowed a fifth year of competition under the new rules that go into effect this fall.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Cincinnati (Hamilton County) seeks temporary and permanent injunctive relief that would allow a fifth year of competition for athletes who graduated from high school in 2022 and began their college sports careers that fall and never redshirted.
The new eligibility rule “unjustifiably restrains their ability to earn money through use of their name, image, and likeness (‘NIL’) connected to their work as Division I athletes,” attorneys Ryan Downton and Charles Rittgers wrote in the complaint.
Similar lawsuits are expected to be filed in other states. A message seeking comment was left with an NCAA spokesperson.
Nine of the plaintiffs have played or planned to play next season at Ohio schools. The rest, according to the complaint, have played multiple games in the state.
The complaint said class of 2022 athletes competed for playing time against older athletes who had eligibility extended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also noted the NCAA allowed 2022 high school graduates to play a full professional season before enrolling in 2023 and that they are not excluded from playing in 2026-27.
“NCAA athletes have a reasonable expectation that they will be treated fairly by the NCAA and that NCAA rules will be applied consistently, regardless of the athlete’s background before they attend an NCAA school and regardless of the year in which they graduated from high school,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit points out that the plaintiffs don't challenge the concept of a defined eligibility period or the five-for-five rule itself.
“Rather, they challenge the NCAA’s application of the rule” that allows players they competed against from the high school class of 2017-20 and 2023-25 an additional year of competition while denying plaintiffs the same opportunity," the attorneys wrote. “The NCAA then compounded the problem by allowing former professional players to compete in their fifth year following high school graduation regardless of the number of professional games they had played, while denying plaintiffs the same opportunity for a fifth year of competition.”
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