Likely Legal Challenges To The NCAA's New 5-For-5 Eligibility Rule
The NCAA Division I Cabinet just overhauled its eligibility system replacing the “five years to play four” rule with a “five years to play five” rule. There are no more redshirt or medical hardship waivers; just a running, five-year clock.
The stated goals of the new rule are simplicity and predictability. But the real goal is reducing litigation.
It won't work. Let’s break down why.
What the NCAA Actually Did
Under the old system, athletes had a five-year window and four seasons of competition running simultaneously. That structure created constant uncertainty. The NCAA continuously created waiver categories in an attempt to manage each exception. Recently, college athletes have taken a liking to the courtroom and have challenged the NCAA in dozens of eligibility lawsuits.
Athletes sued seeking medical hardship waivers the NCAA denied or for years spent playing at a JUCO. Preliminary injunctions essentially became the legal mechanism to create an additional year or more of eligibility.
The new rule eliminates the legal foundation those lawsuits were built on. By eliminating the seasons of competition there can be no medical hardship waiver disputes. No extension waivers means no litigation over sixth-year seniors. The NCAA is essentially arguing that if you remove the rules people were suing over, you remove the lawsuits.
That logic is partially right, but mostly wrong.
What the Rule Change Does Not Do
Changing the rules after a lawsuit is filed does not make the lawsuit go away.
When an athlete sues over a denied medical hardship waiver, the court evaluates whether the NCAA properly applied its rules at the time it made that decision. The NCAA changing its rulebook in 2026 does not retroactively make a 2024 denial proper. The legal question—did the NCAA follow its own rules, or violate federal law—is judged against the rules that existed when the conduct occurred.
The Three Types of Likely Cases
Pending eligibility lawsuits fall into three categories.
The first category is athletes who were fighting to get back a season of competition within their existing five-year window. A sophomore who suffered a torn ACL in week two of the season and was denied a medical hardship waiver, for example.
Under the new rule, seasons of competition don't exist—it’s just a running, five-year clock. The transition provision of the new rule gives current athletes the better of the old rules or the new rule. In many of these cases, the athlete may end up with the eligibility they were seeking anyway (getting that fifth year of eligibility)—not because they won in court, but because the new system made the dispute irrelevant.
This is where the NCAA's strategy is actually clever. A significant portion of pending cases may effectively resolve themselves through the transition rule, without the NCAA ever having to answer in court for the original denial. So in that way, the rule change serves as an out-of-court defense.
The second category is athletes who needed more than the five-year window—those seeking extensions of eligibility beyond what the standard rules allowed. The new rule caps everyone at five years. Extension waivers have been eliminated almost entirely. For these athletes, the transition rule doesn't help. Their window has already expired. The new rule gives them nothing.
The third category is athletes who graduated from high school in 2022, played all four years, and exhausted their four years of eligibility before that fifth year. Their claim is that the NCAA will provide athletes before them (COVID-year athletes) and after them with five seasons of competition, so they should also get that fifth year.
These athletes have the strongest case. There’s no rational basis for the NCAA to single out the 2022 high school graduates as the only group that can’t take advantage of the new rule. The fact that the NCAA made that exception shows how inept it can be in drafting and implementing rules, which is why their the ever-present defendant in a myriad of lawsuits brought by athletes.
The Mootness Problem
The NCAA will argue that the new rule and transition provisions have mooted the prospective relief sought in many pending cases.
Mootness doctrine says a federal court cannot hear a case if there is no longer a live controversy between the parties. If an athlete was seeking an injunction to grant them eligibility to compete, and the transition rule now gives them that eligibility anyway, the injunction has nothing left to order. The case is moot because the athlete got what they sued for: a fifth year of eligibility.
But there is a critical counter-argument: the voluntary cessation doctrine.
The Supreme Court has established that a defendant cannot automatically moot a lawsuit simply by changing the conduct being challenged. The defendant (in this case the NCAA) has to convince the judge that it is "absolutely clear" the wrongful behavior (denial of eligibility waiver) cannot reasonably be expected to recur.
Athletes will argue the NCAA changed its rules specifically because it was repeatedly losing eligibility lawsuits. That looks exactly like voluntary cessation.
The NCAA will counter that this was a permanent, structural change to the eligibility and waiver rules, not just a temporary suspension of the challenged conduct. With the new rule limiting eligibility waivers to three specific circumstances, the recurrence of eligibility lawsuits are impossible. Athletes can’t sue for something that doesn’t exist.
Courts will have to decide which argument wins, which, of course, generates litigation.
Where New Litigation Will Come From
Even if the NCAA successfully reduces or eliminates existing eligibility litigation, the new rule creates its own legal exposure.
The age-based trigger will be challenged. Under the new rule, if an athlete turns 19 before September 1 and doesn’t enroll in college that fall, the eligibility clock starts anyway. A gap year could cost a year of eligibility before an athlete steps on campus.
The NCAA eliminated the delayed enrollment waiver that used to protect athletes in exactly this situation. Athletes who reclassified and lost eligibility to a clock that started before they were even able to participate in college athletics will sue. Courts will be asked to evaluate whether an age-based trigger that runs during non-enrollment is arbitrary or anticompetitive. That’s lawsuit #1.
The elimination of medical hardship waivers will also be tested. The pregnancy exception demonstrates that the NCAA understands some circumstances warrant pausing the clock. Athletes who suffer catastrophic, season-ending injuries will argue there is no principled distinction between pregnancy and a torn ACL that ends a season prematurely. In fact, they may even argue that the pregnancy could be avoided, unlike the ACL injury. That’s lawsuit #2.
The transition rule will be litigated, as well. The rule applies to athletes with "eligibility remaining under previous rules." Athletes currently in litigation whose waiver was denied—and whose eligibility was therefore disputed, not remaining—will argue they qualify. The NCAA will argue they don't. Courts will draw a line somewhere, and whoever is on the wrong side of it will appeal. And that’s lawsuit #3.
The Bottom Line
The NCAA built the new eligibility rule to be litigation-resistant. And while it may be more litigation-resistant than the old system, it certainly isn’t litigation-proof.
The new rule creates a fresh set of legal questions the courts haven't addressed yet. So, the NCAA didn't end the eligibility litigation era. It just changed what the next round of lawsuits will look like.
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