When Courts Start Writing the Rules of College Sports
College sports has spent years debating who should govern it. Increasingly, the answer may be judges.
Eligibility rules are the latest example. In June, the NCAA approved a new age-based model for Division I athletics that will eventually replace the traditional system of four seasons of competition within a five-year window. Under the new framework, athletes who enter college within the relevant age threshold can generally receive up to five years of eligibility. The change was intended to simplify one of college sports’ most complicated regulatory systems, but its transition has instead created another source of legal uncertainty.
The central dispute involves athletes who began competing during the 2022-23 academic year. Many exhausted four seasons of eligibility under the previous rules during 2025-26. Because the NCAA’s transition provisions did not automatically provide those athletes with the additional season available under the new model, players began challenging their exclusion in court.
The individual claims are important, but the larger issue is institutional. When athletes can obtain eligibility through judicial intervention that the governing association itself would not grant, courts are no longer simply reviewing the rules of college sports from the outside. They begin influencing how those rules function in practice. For an organization whose regulatory authority has historically depended on applying common rules across hundreds of institutions, that creates a significant governance problem.
The NCAA’s traditional eligibility system depended heavily on uniformity. A season counted the same way regardless of conference, and an athlete’s eligibility was supposed to be determined by a common regulatory framework rather than by the institution they attended or the jurisdiction in which they happened to compete. That consistency allowed schools, coaches, and athletes to plan around rules that, even when controversial, were at least broadly predictable.
Litigation complicates that model because courts are designed to resolve individual disputes, not administer national sports systems. A judge considering an eligibility challenge is primarily evaluating the rights and harms facing the athletes before the court. If an athlete may lose an entire season while litigation proceeds, that harm is particularly difficult to remedy later. A missed season cannot simply be returned several years after the fact, which makes requests for immediate judicial relief understandable.
The problem is that individually reasonable outcomes can collectively produce an incoherent regulatory system. One athlete may receive an injunction while another athlete in a similar position does not. One university may be willing to build its roster around a player whose eligibility depends on ongoing litigation, while another institution may decide that the legal uncertainty is too significant. Coaches may recruit against eligibility rules that could change shortly before a season begins.
The NCAA can therefore maintain a national rule on paper while losing the ability to guarantee that the rule operates nationally in practice. That distinction has become increasingly important because eligibility no longer determines only whether someone can participate in an extracurricular activity. College athletes now operate within a substantial economic market involving scholarships, direct institutional payments, NIL compensation, professional opportunities, transfer decisions, and representation. An additional season of competition can have significant financial value.
That economic transformation helps explain why eligibility restrictions are receiving greater legal scrutiny. The more college sports begins to resemble a labor market, the harder it becomes to treat rules limiting participation as purely internal sporting regulations. Restrictions on how long an athlete can compete can also determine how long that athlete has access to compensation, exposure, development, and professional opportunities.
None of this means eligibility limits are unnecessary. Some boundary on participation is essential to maintaining the structure of college sports. Without one, institutions could have stronger incentives to retain experienced athletes for longer periods, coaches could increasingly favor proven veterans over developmental recruits, and roster opportunities for younger athletes could contract. A system designed to create opportunities for successive generations of college athletes cannot function effectively if participation becomes effectively indefinite.
The difficult question is therefore not whether eligibility should be regulated, but who should determine the boundaries and how those decisions should be made.
At the moment, that process is becoming increasingly fragmented. The NCAA adopts a rule, athletes challenge it, courts consider emergency relief, institutions adjust their rosters around the resulting uncertainty, and the association responds through appeals or further regulatory changes. Instead of regulation producing predictable outcomes and litigation operating as an occasional safeguard, litigation begins to function as part of the regulatory process itself.
That is difficult to sustain because courts are poorly positioned to account for every consequence of an eligibility rule across the broader system. A judge deciding whether a particular athlete should be permitted to compete is not designing policy around recruiting, roster management, scholarship allocation, athlete development, competitive balance, and professional pathways. Those are institutional tradeoffs that normally belong to a governing body capable of considering the system as a whole.
Yet the NCAA’s weakening legal authority increasingly pushes those decisions elsewhere. This reflects a broader pattern in college sports over the last several years: the existing regulatory model has weakened faster than a replacement has developed.
NIL provides the clearest example. Restrictions collapsed before college sports had agreed on a coherent framework for athlete compensation. Transfer limitations loosened before institutions fully understood how unrestricted mobility would affect roster construction. Revenue sharing developed while fundamental questions about athlete employment remained unresolved. Eligibility reform now risks following the same trajectory, with an existing framework becoming legally unstable before institutions have established a durable replacement.
The result is not an absence of governance. It is a redistribution of governing authority. Some power has shifted toward conferences and universities, some toward athletes and markets, and some toward state legislatures and Congress. Courts are becoming another increasingly important participant in that process.
Judicial oversight can serve an important function. Private sports organizations should not be able to shield economically significant restrictions from legal scrutiny simply by labeling them eligibility rules. Athletes need meaningful mechanisms for challenging regulations that may unlawfully limit their opportunities, particularly as the economic consequences of those rules become more significant.
But there is a difference between courts constraining regulatory power and courts becoming necessary to make the regulatory system function. When athletes repeatedly need emergency litigation to determine whether they can participate, the problem is no longer limited to the legality of individual rules. It suggests that the governing structure itself is struggling to produce rules that are both enforceable and legitimate.
College sports therefore faces a question larger than whether athletes should receive four seasons, five seasons, or some other period of eligibility. It needs a framework capable of providing athletes with predictable rights and institutions with predictable roster structures while still preserving a meaningful process for exceptions and appeals. Most importantly, those mechanisms need enough legal and institutional legitimacy that ordinary eligibility disputes do not routinely become federal cases.
Otherwise, eligibility will increasingly depend on more than an athlete’s age, enrollment history, or seasons played. It may also depend on where a lawsuit is filed, how quickly a court acts, and whether an athlete has the resources to challenge the rule in the first place.
The NCAA may still write the rulebook. But if courts increasingly determine who those rules actually apply to, the more important question is whether the NCAA still governs the system the rulebook was designed to control.
*Photo courtesy of KLKN-TV