NCAA Reportedly Considering Allowing Five Years of Eligibility Across All Sports

01/03/2025 10:28 AM

By James Sutherland on SwimSwam

The NCAA is considering making another seismic shift to the quickly evolving landscape of college sports.

With the pending settlement in the House case, and pushes to unionize college sports teams already at the forefront, the NCAA is now reportedly looking at giving student-athletes five years of eligibility in all sports.

CBS Sports‘ Jon Rothsteinreported Friday that, according to an NCAA official, the organization is looking at allowing all players to have five years to compete collegiately, a topic that “will continue to be discussed in early 2025.”

Current rules dictate that student-athletes have a five-year clock to compete in four collegiate seasons. However, things have been muddied since the COVID-19 pandemic, as due to the interruptions it caused to the 2020-21 season, any athlete who competed in it had the option to use a fifth year of eligibility.

We’ve seen many swimmers and divers take advantage of the COVID fifth year over the last few seasons, but 2024-25 will mark the last time it can be utilized (as freshmen in 2020-21 would now be in their fifth year).

This isn’t the first time the idea has come up in NCAA talks, per reports, as Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported in early September that the NCAA was looking at applying the football redshirt rule to all sports moving forward. Football and wrestling both have rules that allow players to participate in a certain number of contests while still using their redshirt year, while all other sports don’t have the same leeway.

The latest report from Rothstein sounds as if it wouldn’t be applying the redshirt rule to other sports, it would be a blanket rule allowing five years of eligibility for student-athletes.

This news comes just a few weeks after a Tennessee Judge ruled in favor of college football quarterback Diego Pavia, allowing him to compete in the 2025 season despite having exhausted his eligibility under the current rules. Pavia argued that a junior college stint shouldn’t count towards a player’s NCAA eligibility—a junior college stint counts as one season of eligibility per the current rules—and was granted a temporary injunction. This means he’ll be able to play next season (despite being ineligible under the current rules) before the topic is revisited.

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