Candid Coaches: Should 2026 seniors be grandfathered into the NCAA's five-in-five eligibility rule?
Welcome back to another year of CBS Sports' Candid Coaches feature. College basketball insiders Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander surveyed nearly 100 men's Division I coaches in the thick of the offseason; as always, interviewees were given the promise of anonymity in a swap for honest and enlightening answers on a medley of topics. Be it some of the most high-profile names in the game or assistants at low-major programs, Norlander and Parrish spanned the sport to get a wide range of feedback. This year's survey had nine questions, and this is the first in our 2026 series.
The biggest story in college basketball over the past three-plus weeks has been the spate of court-issued injunctions that have pushed back against the NCAA's decision to invoke a new eligibility landscape that officially went into effect less than two months ago. If you're reading a college basketball story in the middle of August, chances are you're mostly aware of what's going on here, but just in case you're not all the way up to speed, here's a summary of what's had college sports abuzz since July.
In late June, the NCAA ratified a new age-based eligibility structure. Moving forward, all Division I athletes will have five years to play as many as five seasons of college sports, with the entry date "no later than the academic year after their 19th birthday." It used to be that students had five years to play four seasons. Now, instead, in an effort to streamline the eligibility clock and reduce the number of lawsuits, the new model is a trade-off is to eliminate almost all waivers and redshirt seasons (with rare exceptions for "pregnancy, active-duty military service and official religious missions.") But, but, but ... the 2025-26 senior class that graduated a few months ago did not get a five-year clock (nor was it discussed as a possibility when this class began college in the early 2020s).
Predictably, lawsuits have taken shape around the country in California, Tennessee, Ohio, Colorado, Georgia and Florida; more are sure to come, probably another by the end of this week. For the time being, dozens of 2026 college grads are moving forward with hopes their cases will win out. Meanwhile, the NCAA's lead lawyer recently put out a statement reinforcing the organization's unwillingness to double back on its June vote.
High-profile teams — Louisville, Arizona, Texas Tech, Houston, Tennessee, Gonzaga — have recently received commitments from players banking on a bonus fifth season, scraping up even more money to deepen their rosters with de facto free agency acquisitions in the depth of the offseason. A handful of players who could be seen trying to cut it at Summer League a month ago are now seriously looking into returning to college ... and hoping they can find the right judge to allow them back in.
The topic is obviously polarizing, beyond all other reasons, because of the NCAA's timing of the rule change. It's empowering an unprecedented surge: basketball programs across the country are recruiting and adding players four-plus months after the end of the previous season.
Given how fervid this issue is, we asked ...
Like clockwork, every year Candid Coaches has a question that prompts significantly more responses and longwinded answers/reasoning in comparison to the rest of the survey. We're starting this year's series with that question. (Though another one coming down the pipe also garnered some very interesting reveals. Stay tuned.)
We asked knowing it was going to have people passionately standing on opposite sides of the debate. The five-in-five twist has caused arguably as much angst as any rule change since NIL implementation in 2021. While nobody knows the fate of this issue just yet, it remains a real possibility that dozens of players successfully sue their way into another year of eligibility in the coming weeks/months ... and the NCAA would be powerless to stop it.
The five-in-five rule itself isn't controversial. If we polled coaches asking them if they were in favor of it moving forward, that would not have been a compelling return because, best I can tell, most like the new standard. College basketball gets a little older, there are no more redshirt seasons, and the eligibility timeline is more clear. But because the NCAA decided to adopt its age-based eligibility model quite literally the week the 2025-26 sports calendar ended, it left a big opening to specifically impact college basketball because it is classified as a winter sport.
But the idea that programs can (and are) adding significant players to their roster in mid-August is borderline farcical. It's one thing to be in the free agent pool in April and May, when the portal is chaotic but everyone is operating (relatively speaking) within the same parameters. Now, instead, it's a matter of which schools still have the money and which schools have the openings to justify trying to bring another guy onto the roster ... months after everyone else came aboard.
Some coaches I spoke with said it is straight-up not an option due to either financial constraints, roster limitations or personal philosophy. There are some coaches out there who think it's morally wrong to aid players through lawsuits just so they can extend their college career on a litigious technicality. Others said it would be negligent not to pursue every avenue to better their team, even at the expense of potentially messing with locker room chemistry. (Some coaches suggested that adding a player in midsummer isn't as problematic, from a team-building standpoint, as other coaches make it out to be.)
One common argument in favor of the 2026 seniors getting that extra year goes this way: Consider how inbound freshmen have been affected since 2021 due to the COVID bonus year that was granted to all players who were in college in 2020-21. While the 2025-26 graduating class was never promised a fifth year (and nor was the 2024-25 class), it now looks arbitrarily harsh to restrict players who had to enter college basketball at a time when the sport was at its oldest (and arguably deepest) point in generations.
The good news is this should only be a one-year issue. Moving forward, everyone will be on the same timeline with five years to play as many as five seasons. There had to be a year to finally cross the Rubicon and 2026 happened to be it. For now, everyone is — almost to a comical level — just going along assuming the lawyers will win out and all these players in these class action lawsuits will be cleared. I think that's how this winds up, but no one really knows. (The NCAA loses a lot in court, but it won the James Bediako case earlier this year, remember.)
This issue is but the newest in a heap of massive alterations to the NCAA's rules and regs in the past eight years. Here's a simplified recap of the most consequential changes since 2018:
»October 2018: Transfer portal launches»Spring 2020: COVID leads to the halt of most winter and spring sports seasons»October 2020: COVID eligibility year is granted»April 2021: One-time transfer exception is approved for immediate eligibility»July 2021: NIL legislation becomes official»Late 2021: NIL collectives are formed to pay players»December 2022: Transfer portal windows are approved»December 2023: Players allowed to be immediately eligible if they were sitting out»June 2024: Multi-time transfers approved for immediate eligibility»June 2025: The House Settlement is formally adopted, salary caps are part of the deal»June 2025: NIL Go clearinghouse is established to police third-party endorsements»June 2026: Five-in-five age-based model is established
And that's to say nothing of what will or won't become of the Protect College Sports Act. The parameters of what's allowable will probably continue to be redefined.
One ACC coach told me: "Pretty soon mid-year transfers will be eligible and so on and so forth. Either swim in the pool or drown but likely you are going to have get in the water to survive."
A lot of coaches aren't comfortable with that, but it's been their reality for years at this point. And the waters don't show signs of receding.