NCAA eligibility court fights are focused on football. Basketball lurks with its own uncertainties

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Michael Malone has gone from winning an NBA championship in his head-coaching career to throwing himself fully into a new world of leading a blueblood college basketball program at North Carolina .

Yet these days, he’s not much different than any college coaching veteran just trying to get a handle on who’s eligible to play and who isn’t.

“What is strange about college athletics is that it seems like the rules change every day,” Malone said Thursday morning. “Like, literally every day. So that is the hardest part."

The NCAA’s move to a five-year, age-based eligibility model has begat a series of eligibility battles in courts across the country, along with last week’s rushed-into-place rules by football-playing power conferences trying to sort out that chaos with the start of the season now at hand.

The same questions hover in basketball, too, as to whether players can come back to college after in failed bids to make the pros or after closing what was supposed to be a four-year career in the spring.

The sport has the benefit of more time for those cases to make their way through the legal system. Still, preseason practices officially begin later this month, and there’s roughly two months remaining until the season kicks off on Nov. 1. It is unclear how much clarity will come between now and then as to the status of more than 250 men’s and women’s players involved in some type of court action tied to the NCAA's age-based eligibility model.

That includes for Malone's first UNC team. South Dakota transfer big man Cameron Fens committed last month to UNC when he appeared to be eligible to play a fifth season after one court ruling, only to be ineligible again based on a stay issued in response to an appeal.

“You put together the best team you can, you start practicing in the summer and now let’s unleash 80 players into the sport in the first week of August,” UConn men’s coach and two-time NCAA champion Dan Hurley said last month. “You can’t go on like this, no other sport is going like this. ... It is total chaos and it is not sustainable.”

The change has largely centered around the NCAA's adoption of a five-year eligibility model that is due to be fully implemented next fall. It will allow players to have five years of eligibility with the clock starting when an athlete turns 19 or graduates from high school, whichever is earliest.

But that quickly led to lawsuits from four-year players in the high school class of 2022, who began their careers in the 2022-23 season and completed four seasons of eligibility but are seeking that fifth year.

In data as of Thursday morning, the NCAA said there have been 79 lawsuits with a total of 450 plaintiffs across all sports involved in litigation tied to the five-year rule, with 234 of those coming in men's basketball and 33 in women's basketball. Of that group, 154 men's players and 26 women's players have received some type of relief from the courts allowing them to play while the rest are currently be ineligible.

Yet things can change rapidly, with players moving from one category to the other.

Last season, basketball got a preview of what was to come when Alabama's Charles Bediako won a temporary restraining order allowing him to play five games for the Crimson Tide last year after playing in the NBA G League. An Alabama judge ultimately sided with the NCAA that Bediako should be ineligible .

And now, former St. John's standout guard RJ Luis Jr. is trying to play for new LSU coach Will Wade despite going pro after the 2024-25 season and spending time with two NBA teams. A Louisiana judge cleared the way for him last week to start practicing and potentially play for the Tigers; Luis was briefly under contract with the Utah Jazz and Boston Celtics but never played in an NBA game.

These fights have also come with the NCAA and major conferences pushing Congress for help by passing the Protect College Sports Act . That bipartisan measure has been touted by supporters as having the ability to tamp down on the lawsuits that have led to the eligibility issues.

The Power Four football conferences — the SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten and Big 12 — all adopted bans of former pro athletes last week . The Big 12 banned professional athletes from competing in any league-sponsored sport, while the SEC and the ACC bans focused on men's and women's basketball along with football. The Big Ten's was limited to football.

The Big East, the only other league to win an NCAA title in the past decade, has yet to formally adopt a similar policy. But that league doesn't have football as a pressing concern with basketball as its flagship sport with the November tipoff, and that comes with the Big East in the first days of Tim Brosnan's tenure as commissioner .

A person with knowledge of the situation said Big East schools are discussing options and monitoring developments tied to the eligibility cases as well as the actions taken by other top leagues. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the league hasn’t publicly discussed those evaluations.

Back at UNC, Fens joined the roster as a county judge in Tennessee granted him and 18 other basketball players a temporary injunction to retain their eligibility for a fifth year.

But in recent weeks, that state’s Court of Appeals put on hold that order , meaning Fens can practice but is currently ineligible to play. That was one of multiple wins for the NCAA in ongoing litigation across the nation, including stays of injunctions in Ohio and South Carolina state courts as well as in a federal court in Colorado.

Malone — who coached three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic to the 2023 title with the Denver Nuggets — knows it all can change quickly. So he's leaning on his staff to keep him “attuned” to developments while he focuses on preparing the Tar Heels for November, and other pressing matters.

“I still haven't found a place to live, so I've got to find a place to live, man, you know?” he quipped.

AP freelance writer Jim Fuller in Storrs, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

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