Complaint Month: NCAA’s New Eligibility Model Is Imperfect, but It’s the Right Move

The NCAA is—gasps—on the verge of doing something right.

We’ve deemed this Complaint Month around college sports, and few topics have generated more consistent frustration among coaches and other industry sources than eligibility concerns: who’s actually allowed to play college sports and for how long. It’s where a significant portion of the legal attacks against the NCAA have come from in recent years; players suing to extend their five-year eligibility clock, having seasons at non-Division I schools not count as years of eligibility or just blowing up all limits on who can play college sports altogether.

Complaint Month: Ryan Day, Kirby Smart, Dabo Swinney and a ref yelling. — May is Complaint Month in college sports with leaders airing their grievances on everything from postseason expansion to eligibility concerns. Sports Illustrated examines these complaints and where the sport is headed. | Clockwise from bottom left: Alex Slitz/Getty Images; James Gilbert/Getty Images; David Rosenblum/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images

Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia’s lawsuit that allowed him an additional year of Division I competition had major ripple effects throughout college sports in the 2025–26 academic year, and other challenges are assuredly coming when the chance to make six or even seven figures in college is on the line.

The NCAA’s new “age-based eligibility” model, which is on the verge of passing and going into effect starting in 2026–27, would be a massive step in simplifying the eligibility process and ensuring that college sports are played by college-aged athletes.

For those unacquainted, here’s a brief synopsis of the model:

Athletes would have a five-year window to play college sports from their 19th birthday or their high school graduation date, whichever comes first. They’d be allowed to participate in competition in all five seasons of that window, a major change from the five-to-play-four model that has ruled the NCAA for years.
Redshirting as a concept would vanish. Players could play as much or as little as they want in that five-year window, but wouldn’t get an extra year due to injury or some of the other exceptions that have created tons of work vetting waivers for the NCAA in recent years. The only reasons the five-year clock could get paused would be military service, religious missions and pregnancy.

“The goal here was to come up with something that was a lot simpler and sort of familiar,” NCAA commissioner Charlie Baker told Sports Illustrated in April. “If you think about it, we all grow up playing sports and our kids grow up playing sports and it’s U-10, U-12, U-15, U-18, U-20, U-22 leagues, right? The idea of an age-based dynamic or parameter is pretty familiar. That’s the way most of amateur sports is organized in who gets to participate.

“It became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that a lot of people really appreciated the simplicity of [the concept] and the fact that it creates kind of a clock.”

Will this end all legal challenges to the NCAA’s eligibility rules? Definitely not. But what age-based eligibility does do is attempt to apply the rules as evenly as possible across all players in all sports rather than dealing with the case-by-case waiver applications that inevitably led to lawsuits.

Here’s a look at three ways the new model should help college sports … and two reasons it could flop.

A fifth season of competition could help players graduate

Among the bigger consequences of players transferring sometimes two or even three times in a college career is the risk that players don’t graduate. Credits often don’t completely transfer over from school to school, and some universities require a certain percentage of credits be taken at that school to issue a degree. Since the toothpaste is likely never going back into the tube on preventing players from transferring multiple times (save for congressional intervention), allowing players to play a fifth year gives them another year to work toward graduation.

It keeps 25-year-olds out of college sports

The backlash when 21-year-old former second-round NBA draft pick James Nnaji was granted college eligibility last winter was largely due to him being … well, drafted. But quietly, one of the more objectionable parts of the saga was that the NCAA granted him four years of eligibility. Why? Nnaji hadn’t graduated high school until 2024, pushing back his eligibility clock to the point that he could still have four years to play if he started playing in 2025–26. Particularly in basketball and other sports where recruiting has become increasingly a global endeavor, the old system left open loopholes for players who had later high school graduation dates to play deeper into their 20s.

Players don’t redshirt when healthy anyway

Much as it may dismay older coaches who loved the idea of a player developing for a year before playing in college, players by and large don’t want to redshirt. Football has sidestepped this by allowing players to play in four games and still redshirt without an injury to give freshmen a taste of the field without burning a year. In other sports like basketball, it has become rare for players to redshirt while healthy. The five-to-play-four model served its purpose for a time, but the age-based model makes more sense in the current state of college sports.

The rollout could be bumpy

The move to the age-based model has also happened much faster than just about any other major change in college sports history, buoyed by a streamlined governance structure that Baker and the NCAA has implemented. The goal is to have this in place for the 2026–27 season, potentially finalizing things in June. But the NCAA doesn’t want to grandfather in graduating seniors, giving them one more year of eligibility in some cases.

Adding insult to injury for those graduating seniors is they spent much of their careers playing with (and against) players who got a fifth season by way of the additional COVID-19 season of eligibility. Prominent college sports lawyer Darren Heitner has hinted at legal action, and he’s likely not alone. If those challenges are successful, the chaos of a glut of instantly eligible seniors looking to come back to college over the summer would wreak havoc on rosters in just about every sport.

What about high school athletes?

This is a common refrain regarding just about any shift in the college landscape these days—that opportunities for high school athletes to play in college get reduced the more 23-year-olds are eligible to play college sports. The NCAA would (correctly) retort that a not-insignificant portion of Division I was already spending five years in college occupying a roster spot, they were just redshirting (either healthily or due to injury) for one of those seasons. Even some four-year players wouldn’t have qualified for any additional eligibility if they went to prep school and enrolled later in college. Still, particularly early on, the opening up of a potential fifth year to play may discourage coaches from recruiting high school athletes, opting instead to mine the transfer portal with a slightly deeper pool to pick from.

The bottom line

Is age-based eligibility a silver bullet for the NCAA? No. It doesn’t solve plenty of other thorny questions surrounding amateurism and likely won’t put a complete halt to the constant court cases the NCAA constantly finds itself embroiled in. But no other college sports controversy (salary caps, transfers, realignment, playoff sizes) is nearly as important for the future of the enterprise than keeping college sports as a league for college-aged players. That fact is more likely threatened if the NCAA kept the status quo and stayed in the waiver business. Simplifying the calculus for who’s actually allowed to play college sports is a huge step in the right direction.

More College Basketball From Sports Illustrated

Listen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s College YouTube channel.

Add us as a preferred source on Google