At roughly 5 o’clock on the evening of October 27th, 2025, Spokane County Judge Marla Polin granted incoming Gonzaga Bulldogs transfer, Tyon Grant-Foster, a preliminary injunction overruling the NCAA’s denial of his college basketball eligibility waiver. It was the legal equivalent of telling the sport’s governing body that no, actually, this man gets to play college basketball one more time. Upon hearing the ruling, Grant-Foster leaned forward and put both palms over his forehead. Then he stood up and wiped tears from his eyes. Coach Mark Few offered a pat on the back on the way out of the courtroom.
A couple hours later, Tyon was on the floor at McCarthey Athletic Center.
Somewhere between the Spokane County Courthouse and the arena, he changed clothes, laced up, and walked out to officially play real basketball in a Gonzaga uniform for the first time ever. The three denied waivers, the summer of workouts away from the team in Kansas City and Phoenix while lawyers argued about his eligibility in rooms he wasn’t allowed to enter, the Instagram story that read “What did I do? Why are they so against me?” all of it dissolved the moment he stepped onto that floor.
“I can sleep now,” he said afterward.
That’s the image that should open any honest account of Tyon Grant-Foster’s season with the Zags. The dude sued the NCAA for the right to be here. He won. And then, with the ink barely dry on the court order, he went and played a basketball game. Everything that followed has to be understood through that lens.
Tyon Grant-Foster grew up in Kansas City dreaming of one day playing for the Jayhawks. After two seasons at Indian Hills Community College in Iowa, that dream came true, sort of. He enrolled to play under Coach Bill Self, appeared in 22 games during the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season, eight minutes a night off the bench, then transferred to DePaul looking for more.
He played exactly half a game.
On November 11th, 2021, Grant-Foster collapsed on his way back to the locker room at DePaul’s season opener. Doctors shocked his heart back into rhythm three times. He was diagnosed with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, a rare condition affecting the heart muscle, and told he would never play basketball again. A few months later he collapsed a second time during a pickup game in Kansas City, went through a second surgery, and spent the next sixteen months away from basketball entirely.
He came out the other side with Mayo Clinic clearance and left DePaul to enroll at Grand Canyon University for 2023-24. What followed was one of the great individual seasons in recent mid-major history: 20.1 points per game, 6.1 rebounds, 1.7 steals and 1.5 blocks, WAC Player of the Year, and an NCAA Tournament run that included a first-round win over Saint Mary’s (played, fittingly, in Spokane) before losing to Alabama. An ankle injury limited him to 26 games the following year, but he averaged 14.8, earned first-team All-WAC again, and then committed to Gonzaga.
What He Brought to the Floor — And What He Was Working Against
Gonzaga spent the entire summer of 2025 building a roster and a scheme around a player they couldn’t practice with. When the NCAA denied his waiver on October 18th and he sat in street clothes for the Northwest exhibition — watching Davis Fogle go for 18 points in his first college action, watching Steele Venters finally return after two seasons lost to injury, watching Jalen Warley run the second unit like someone who’d been waiting a year to prove himself — the wing logjam that had been theoretical all summer became very real. And with Tyon’s eligibility situation still very much up in the air, the Zags were looking at a rotational problem before he was even cleared to play.
By the time Grant-Foster got cleared and into game shape, Fogle had already begun to establish himself as someone Few couldn’t keep off the floor. Emmanuel Innocenti’s defensive instincts similarly meant minutes might be in short supply even once Tyon got fully up to speed. The hierarchy everyone had assumed — TGF as the clear-cut wing starter alongside Huff and Ike — never fully materialized. He started just 6 of 35 games, and the opening-night situation, where an unnamed assistant accidentally penciled him into the starting lineup before Few corrected it, was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for the early-season confusion around his role.
Once he settled in off the bench, the production was genuine. He finished with 387 points and 174 rebounds, led the entire roster with 38 blocks, and shot 47.5 percent from the field. His perimeter shot-blocking — something Few openly said he’d never had from a wing — changed how opponents attacked Gonzaga’s half-court defense all season. The 5-block, 19-point, 7-of-9 performance in the January overtime win over Seattle is the cleanest single-game illustration; the 21 points on 9-of-16 against Alabama in November showed he could go toe-to-toe with high-major defenses; the 20 points on 7-of-11 in the WCC Tournament final against Santa Clara came when Gonzaga needed someone to step up and take over. The 12-rebound night at Arizona State told you something about his motor. The modest averages (1.1 points, 5.0 rebounds, 21.5 minutes) reflect a player who never had a fully stable role to settle into more than they reflect the player himself.
The Fit That Never Quite Settled
When Braden Huff’s knee gave out in practice on January 15th, it didn’t just cost Gonzaga their leading scorer, it rearranged the geometry of the entire roster. Warley moved into the starting lineup. Fogle’s role ballooned in the scoring vacuum left by Huff. Mario Saint Supery began to eclipse starting point guard Braeden Smith to manufacture some more offensive dynamism and keep the Ike-centric gamescript more fluid. The entire infrastructure built around the Huff-Ike frontcourt had to be reconstructed on the fly, in January, with a top-four seed on the line. Without Huff, Gonzaga became a fundamentally different team. Every player in that rotation felt it, and Grant-Foster was no exception.
He had been recruited as the athletic, switchable three in a loaded frontcourt. With Huff gone, he found himself logging significant minutes at the four, a position he was not brought here to play, in a system whose demands around help rotations and half-court spacing were already a steep enough learning curve at his natural spot. At GCU he was the unquestioned fulcrum of the offense running 34 minutes a night. At Gonzaga, he was still learning the playbook when the roster reshuffled around him.
The volatility Zag fans noticed all season (like the 9-of-16 against Alabama followed by a 1-of-10 against Washington State, the 20-point WCC final followed by 7 points against Texas) was partly Grant-Foster being Grant-Foster, a player whose production has always run hot and cold. But it was also the natural result of someone asked to do different things on different nights, operating within 13 different starting lineups across a season that never stopped shifting underneath him. He arrived six days before the opener having practiced twice. That he shot 47.5 percent, led the team in blocks, and delivered in some of the season’s most important moments is probably the more remarkable thing.
The WCC Tournament felt like the sendoff this group deserved. Grant-Foster’s 20 points in the championship game against Santa Clara was his most complete game as a Zag, and when Gonzaga cut down nets for the sixth time in seven years, it felt like the right kind of ending for a senior class that had been through as much as this one had.
The NCAA Tournament’s first stop in Portland was harder. With 8:36 left against Texas and the game tied at 53, Grant-Foster hit a three to put Gonzaga up one, the kind of shot that, on another night, becomes the moment everyone remembers. Instead Texas then went on a 9-2 run, and when it was over Grant-Foster had 7 points in 19 minutes and a season-ending loss to an 11 seed to sit with. Camden Heide’s corner three, the one that put the game out of reach for the Zags with 14 seconds left, came over Grant-Foster’s outstretched hand.
An eight-year long college basketball career, two heart surgeries, court injunctions, one season in Spokane, and it ends just like that. The senior class said their goodbyes to a program and a conference Gonzaga won’t see again. Grant-Foster said it hurt his heart.
But what Tyon gave this program is worth praising. He led the roster in blocks, brought a type of defensive disruption to the perimeter that Few had never had at the position, and delivered the season’s most memorable individual performances in a moment that called for someone to take over. Freak athletes and perimeter shot-blockers don’t grow on trees, and neither do players with the competitive fire that comes from having genuinely earned the right to be on the floor.
Huff went down, then Warley got hurt, the rotation reshuffled, and Grant-Foster just kept playing, Say what you will about Tyon, but the dude never stopped looking for new ways to settle into the most impactful role possible.
Zag fans spent the summer and fall of 2025 refreshing their phones for waiver updates, reading court filings, learning what a preliminary injunction actually meant for their team’s season. That experience — the uncertainty, the legal maneuvering, the last-minute resolution — turned out to be a preview of what portal season now looks like for every program in the country (setting a Google News alert for “Rick Pitino” in April is not something I thought I’d ever have to endure in my time as a college basketball fan).
The NCAA’s proposed 5-in-5 rule, advanced by the Division I Board just this month in response to the broader flood of eligibility lawsuits that has overwhelmed the governing body in recent years, would impose a strict five-year window for college athletes’ eligibility, beginning the year after a player turns 19: no extensions, no redshirt exemptions, no exceptions for medical hardship, no waivers, no court orders. Under that framework, the sixteen months Grant-Foster spent recovering from two heart surgeries would have simply disappeared into the clock; he’d have exhausted his eligibility before ever setting foot at GCU, let alone Spokane. The rule is designed to bring order to a system that is spiraling. The NCAA spent over $16 million fighting eligibility cases last year alone and lost most of them, but the simplicity that makes it enforceable is the same simplicity that makes it brutal. There would no longer be any mechanism for the next Grant-Foster, no process by which two years of heart surgeries and collapsed-on-a-gym-floor medical reality gets factored into anything. That won’t necessarily stop the NCAA.
If you want to understand how the governing body of college athletics approaches its most complex eligibility decisions, imagine watching someone hitting themselves in the crotch with a hammer, repeatedly, over and over again, while pleading for a larger hammer. The 5-in-5 rule may be exactly that hammer, and there is every reason to believe it’s coming anyway.
Which makes what Tyon Grant-Foster did in Spokane all the more worth remembering. He saw the system at its most obstinate, fought it in open court, and won, and then went and played basketball for a year in a way that reminded everyone watching why any of it was worth fighting for in the first place. He gave Gonzaga moments this season that nobody else on the roster could have provided, and he did it while absorbing more uncertainty and roster upheaval than any player should reasonably have to manage in their final stop.
As you spend this summer refreshing your phone waiting on portal news or waiver decisions or court rulings, you can thank Tyon for breaking you in gently. He was the original. And he was worth every minute of the wait.
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