The NCAA just drew a line through an entire high school class like they were erasing a bad debt, and twenty-five more players just walked into a California courtroom to cash the check. Donovan Dent and Jordan Pope headline the latest suit, and I felt that filing land like the moment in Casino when the bosses realize the skim is over and somebody is going to get whacked for the shortfall.
These are Class of 2022 kids. Four seasons played. No redshirts. Eligibility clock punched out under the old rules at the end of 2025-26. Then the NCAA Division I Cabinet unanimously green-lights an age-based model that hands everybody else five seasons in a five-year window, grandfathers the ones still carrying eligibility, and leaves this group standing outside the club with their bags. Full implementation hits for 2027 enrollees. Current athletes get the better of the old rules or the new ones. The exhausted Class of 2022 gets nothing. That is not a transition. That is a hit.
An Ohio judge already called it. Twenty-four men’s and women’s basketball players got a preliminary injunction after Judge Christopher Wagner found the application arbitrary and capricious. Irreparable harm. Lost NIL. Lost opportunity. He let them play 2026-27 and open the transfer portal outside the normal window. The NCAA wanted a stay. Denied. Now the same attorneys, Darren Heitner and Ryan Downton, dropped another suit in California seeking an injunction that covers more than forty-five athletes. Dent averaged 13.4 points across 139 college games at New Mexico and UCLA before announcing retirement this spring. He is trying to come back. Pope put up 13.1 points and 2.1 rebounds at Oregon State and Texas. These are not fringe names padding a docket. They are real minutes, real production, real money left on the table.
The complaint language from the Ohio case nails the gut of it: “The NCAA’s application of this bylaw to Plaintiffs unfairly limits the number of games they can participate in during their ‘five-year eligibility window’ and unjustifiably restrains their ability to earn money through use of their name, image, and likeness (“NIL”) connected to their work as Division I athletes.” Read that again. The five-year window exists. The games do not. The NIL does not. That is the entire racket exposed in one sentence.
I keep coming back to the $1.3 billion organization size the Ohio judge referenced while describing the NCAA. A machine that size does not accidentally forget a recruiting class. They chose roster stability and incoming freshmen expectations over the kids who already gave four years. Xavier’s Richard Pitino testified his program had to award $14 million in NIL to the men’s basketball roster. That is the new economy. These Class of 2022 players are being locked out of it by a rule change that arrived one summer too late for them and one summer too early for fairness.
This is the scene in Goodfellas where the crew starts killing each other over the Lufthansa money because nobody trusts the split. The NCAA wants Congress to clean it up. Of course they do. They lost control of the NIL era the second the money got real, and now they are trying to manage the cleanup by sacrificing the group that cannot hurt their 2026-27 depth charts. I do not buy the destabilization argument. You write a five-year model, you own the five years. Selective application is just negligence with a better vocabulary.
I am all the way in with these players. The age-based model itself is coherent. Five seasons, five years, fewer redshirt gymnastics, cleaner clocks. The betrayal is the exclusion. Dent, Pope, Skyy Clark, Aidan Mahaney, Jaxon Kohler, and the rest of that California list are not asking to rewrite history. They are asking to finish the window the NCAA itself just created. The Ohio injunction already proved a court will listen. Multiple states now. A separate federal class action in Colorado with eleven athletes. This is not one angry filing. This is a wave.
If the NCAA keeps fighting the stay and the merits while more suits pile up, they are Tony Soprano insisting the rules still matter after everybody else has already moved the money. I watched enough of these eligibility wars to know the house only wins until the players stop showing up empty-handed. Twenty-five more just refused. Good. Make them feel it in the chest the way the rest of us have for years.
