Mark Few is trying to build a basketball team. And the NCAA is making that as hard as possible.
What follows is a good faith attempt to explain to your average college sports fan what has happened in courtrooms across the country and why the Zags still have roster spots they can’t fill the way they’d like yet.
Fair warning: a lot of what follows is still being decided in real time. This situation is moving fast enough that some of it may already look different by the time you read it.
This is the story of how the NCAA created a crisis entirely of its own making, how players are fighting back in courtrooms from Ohio to Colorado, and why college sports fans should be upset and baffled by all of it.
So, how did we get here? Well, in short, it’s a mess. The best way to get a grip on things is probably to look at how this all started.
January 14-17, 2026 — The first rumblings of the NCAA’s proposed five-in-five policy surface publicly at the annual NCAA Convention in Nashville. The concept is straightforward: instead of granting D1 athletes four seasons of eligibility spread across five years, every Division I athlete would instead get five seasons in five years, with the eligibility clock starting at enrollment or their 19th birthday, whichever came first. No more redshirts, no more waivers, no more seventh-year seniors. A clean system replacing a broken one. In theory, the right call.
But the new rule’s language made clear that athletes who had exhausted their eligibility by spring 2026 would not be grandfathered in. That meant one specific group — players who enrolled in fall 2022, played four straight years without burning a redshirt, and finished their careers that spring — were left out in the cold. Every class ahead of them got a free COVID year after the 2019-20 season was canceled. Every class behind them would get five years as a corrective measure. This group, through no fault of their own, would get neither. Something this nakedly unfair seemed like the kind of thing that gets quietly fixed in the final language. It was not.
June 23, 2026 — The Cabinet votes unanimously to approve the rule and it takes effect the next day. The NCAA’s position: players in the class of 2022 already received the full eligibility they were promised when they enrolled and the organization is under no obligation to litigate fairness in moneymaking opportunities lost under legislation that didn’t exist yet. An ironic position for an organization that just signed off on a $2.8 billion settlement requiring it to share revenue directly with athletes for the first time, simultaneously acknowledging that athletes deserve to be compensated while drawing a hard line around who gets to participate in that compensation. Courts across the country would spend the next six weeks telling them that was the same antitrust violation they’d been losing on for two decades.
June 24, 2026 — Within hours of the rule going live, a group of 15 basketball players files suit in Hamilton County Court in Cincinnati, Ohio, assigned to Judge Christopher Wagner. The argument is straightforward: when these players signed on to an NCAA school, the rulebook in place was the deal, and changing it after four years of decisions built around those rules is a breach of contract. The NCAA maintains the players got exactly what they were promised. Judge Wagner would later call the exclusion “arbitrary and in bad faith.”
July 8, 2026 — A second lawsuit lands in federal court in Denver. Twelve players led by University of Northern Colorado’s Brock Wisne and Minnesota’s Cade Tyson file before Judge Charlotte Sweeney. Where the Ohio suit argues breach of contract in state court, Wisne goes federal antitrust, seeking relief not just for the named plaintiffs but for every class of 2022 athlete in the country simultaneously.
July 9, 2026 — Judge Wagner rules in Ohio, finds a clear contractual obligation between the NCAA and its athletes, calls the exclusion “arbitrary and in bad faith,” and grants the injunction. Everything could have ended there with a blanket eligibility waiver. Instead, the NCAA’s public response: “We do not intend to change course.”
July 17, 2026 — The Ohio ruling triggers a wave of similar filings in state courts across the country. In California, attorneys Ryan Downton and Darren Heitner — the same legal team behind the Ohio suit — file a state court injunction on behalf of a group of class of 2022 players. Among those joining is former UCLA guard Donovan Dent, who had announced his retirement from basketball weeks earlier. Gonzaga, which had pursued Dent heavily before he chose UCLA the previous offseason, is immediately in the mix. He is the best point guard available, and with the sudden departure of Mario Saint-Supery, the Bulldogs need one badly. It looks, briefly, like everything might work out.
July 22, 2026 — The NCAA appeals the Ohio ruling to the First District Court of Appeals but is denied a stay, meaning the ruling stands while the appeal plays out. The appellate court looks at what the NCAA is offering and says the argument wasn’t convincing the first time, and it isn’t convincing now. The NCAA has now lost twice on the same argument.
July 31, 2026 — Two courts rule on the same day. In Nashville, Davidson County Chancellor I’Ashea Myles grants a temporary injunction to 19 athletes, giving them a fifth year and free portal access. Critically, her ruling explicitly blocks the NCAA from enforcing its rule of restitution, a mechanism that allows the NCAA to retroactively vacate wins, strip championships, and claw back television revenue from any school that played a player under a court order that is later overturned. Schools signing these players are protected even if the ruling is reversed on appeal. Hours later in Denver, Judge Sweeney certifies Wisne as a nationwide class action covering every class of 2022 athlete in the country. Her ruling does not include that same protection. NCAA Chief Legal Officer Scott Bearby calls the ruling “egregiously wrong.” NCAA President Charlie Baker calls on Congress to pass emergency legislation. The NCAA has now lost in Ohio, Tennessee, and federal court in Colorado. They do not change course.
August 1, 2026 — Donovan Dent enters the transfer portal with a “Do Not Contact” tag. Gonzaga is widely reported as the frontrunner. The path seems clear: Dent gets his fifth year, joins the portal, lands in Spokane. It is not going to be that simple.
August 2, 2026 — The NCAA asks Judge Sweeney to clarify what her ruling covers. She does. The injunction grants a fifth year of eligibility and nothing else. No free portal access, no transfer freedom. Players who didn’t enter the portal when it was open in April cannot transfer freely despite newly granted eligibility. The problem is obvious: how could these players have entered the portal in April when they had no remaining eligibility? Players like UCLA’s Skyy Clark and Aidan Mahaney entered the portal in April without guaranteed eligibility and can now transfer freely. Dent didn’t. Why would he? He was out of eligibility and formally retired. Under the Colorado ruling, his only path back is UCLA. His path to Gonzaga runs through the California filing, which hasn’t ruled yet.
August 3, 2026 — The NCAA appeals Wisne to the 10th Circuit and moves for an emergency stay. Some schools are already signing newly eligible players covered by the Ohio and Tennessee rulings, which are considered more durable. The Wisne class is different. That ruling did not address the rule of restitution. Without that protection, schools signing Wisne class players are taking on real risk: sign a player today, lose the appeal in October, lose every win that player appeared in, retroactively. Until Judge Sweeney clarifies whether the rule of restitution applies to the Wisne class, schools are operating without that protection.
August 4, 2026 — The Wisne plaintiffs file an emergency motion accusing the NCAA of blocking players from joining rosters in defiance of the court order. The filing includes a sworn declaration from Aislin Malcolm, a women’s basketball player from Robert Morris, stating that her previous school no longer has a roster spot for her, she has a scholarship and NIL offer from another Division I program, and she cannot accept it. She didn’t enter the portal in April because she believed she had no eligibility. She won her eligibility back in court, but she cannot transfer, and she cannot return to her previous school. The situation remains both absurd and preventable. It’s Shrodinger’s additional year of NIL opportunity, and Malcolm is not the only one dealing with the uncertainty.
Donovan Dent has been granted a fifth year of eligibility; the court says so, this is uncontroversial. What he does not yet have is the right to use it anywhere but UCLA. If the California ruling mirrors Tennessee, Dent can go wherever he wants. If it doesn’t, he’ll most likely re-retire rather than suffer another year under Mick Cronin.
Most disturbing, perhaps, is that while all this plays out in court, the NCAA is pursuing its most audacious play: the Protect College Sports Act. The PCSA is a bipartisan bill already out of the Senate Commerce Committee that would grant the NCAA full antitrust immunity in its enforcement of eligibility and transfer rules. To understand just how brazenly insane this is, The Sherman Act, the same federal law that produced every ruling against the NCAA since NIL became a thing, would simply no longer apply to them. The NCAA spent a decade losing antitrust cases because courts found it was illegally restricting athletes’ ability to earn compensation for their labor, and its legislative response has been to ask Congress to make the illegal thing legal now. It’s a childish and shortsighted gambit, and as Senator Chris Murphy put it, “[t]he NCAA’s push for antitrust immunity is not about protecting athlete amateurism or opportunity. It is about power.”
None of this had to happen. The NCAA could have waited until the following academic year to implement five-in-five. It could have grandfathered in the class of 2022. When Ohio ruled against it, it could have accepted the verdict and changed course. When Colorado and Tennessee ruled against it, it could have issued a blanket eligibility waiver and ended the litigation overnight. It had the power. It still does. And it has declined every time.
The central problem is that for decades the NCAA propped up a mythology of amateurism while operating one of the most lucrative labor systems in American sports, building a multi-billion dollar industry on the work of athletes it classified as students, paid nothing, and legally prevented from seeking compensation elsewhere. Regardless of how fans feel about the NIL/House Settlement era, the courts have deemed the policies of the NCAA nakedly illegal, repeatedly, at every level of the judicial system, for twenty years. The NCAA is not compensating athletes out of generosity. It was a court-ordered correction. And the NCAA’s response has been to appeal every ruling, delay every remedy, and lobby Congress for immunity from the consequences it keeps earning.
This is what it looks like when someone who has been getting away with something for a long time finally gets caught, and decides the problem is the catching, not the thing they were doing.
It’s Calvin Ball, played by suits and lawyers, but the consequences are real and the ones who suffer are student athletes and their families, because the organization that governs their sport would rather litigate than admit it was acting in bad faith.
The NCAA is once again throwing a grand scale tantrum and calling it governance. Predictably, it’s the athletes and the schools that employ them who are the ones paying for it.
