During a conversation with Tad Boyle early Friday afternoon regarding the NCAA’s latest eligibility matters, Colorado’s men’s basketball coach offered a prediction.
Earlier this summer, the NCAA expanded eligibility parameters for all athletes to five years, eliminating redshirts while allowing players five years to play five seasons on a career clock that begins with their high school graduation or their 19th birthday, whichever arrives first.
The five-for-five format was set to begin in full next year, with all current student-athletes eligible for a fifth season. The caveat was that all athletes who exhausted their four years of eligibility this year would remain ineligible.
“It’ll be interesting, because now the fifth-years are eligible this year, you’ve got kids coming back to college,” Boyle said. “You’re going to see coaches get rid of kids. If it hasn’t happened already, try three, four weeks.”
Or maybe just a few hours.
Later that afternoon in Denver, U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney granted an injunction allowing all athletes from the 2022 class — those who began play in 2022-23, and used four years of eligibility through 2025-26 — another year of eligibility.
The ruling opens the door for athletes who went through their sportap senior day this past year to return to school, at CU and beyond.
With the Buffs’ fourth preseason under head coach Deion Sanders set to open Sunday in Colorado Springs, it is unclear what impact the ruling will have on the Buffs’ football program. While CU has not yet released a preseason roster, the Buffs carried 95 players during the spring, so there is room to grow toward the NCAA’s 105-player limit ahead of CU’s season opener Sept. 3 at Georgia Tech.
Boyle’s roster is at the 15-player capacity and would have to execute the very situation he described hours ahead of Friday’s ruling — dropping players to create roster space — in order to add any player with a newly added fifth year of eligibility. The only senior from last season’s CU men’s basketball team, center Elijah Malone, doesn’t get the extra year because he played a total of six collegiate seasons between CU and his previous school, Grace College in Indiana.
Unlike Boyle, CU women’s basketball coach JR Payne still has one open roster spot with a familiar and intriguing possibility in the mix in Jade Masogayo. A two-time All-Big 12 honoree (second team this past season, honorable mention in 2025), Masogayo fits the parameters for gaining the extra season, having played a total of four years between Missouri State and CU. Masogayo played two preseason games with the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx but isn’t on a WNBA roster.
“I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — I think the only way we get to a hard set of rules with teeth in the transfer area is if we have collective bargaining. I just don’t see any other way,” Boyle said. “All I know is what we’ve done (in the NCAA) over the last five years since NIL and the transfer portal have come together, everything we’ve tried, itap been a failure.”
The NCAA is expected to appeal the ruling, and the ruling also put renewed focus on passing the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill that has languished in congress but received a critical boost Friday night when the SEC and Big Ten finally backed the bill following concessions regarding the language for third-party NIL deals.
NCAA president , “Today’s rulings and the chaos they bring to college sports are exactly why it’s time to pass this bill.”
Boyle joked that he often wakes up and immediately checks the news to see what rules have changed. That roller coaster isn’t likely to end anytime soon.
“Itap a little disheartening, but itap the world we live in,” Boyle said. “You wake up every day. You see if the rules have changed. Sometimes they have and sometimes they haven’t.”
