LOS ANGELES — We’ve all been enrolled at Make It Make Sense University. It turns out it’s a fraudulent diploma mill.
Instead of an updated textbook, we’ve opened a Pandora’s Box of problems, and every string that’s pulled – well-intentioned or otherwise – tears at the fabric of what made college sports wonderful.
In the thick of this mess now with no roadmap and no flashlight, we do have judges – real-world referees and umpires – creating new precedent every day, for the day. Which isn’t much of a precedent at all.
Take Diego Pavia’s case against the NCAA. If you’re a USC or UCLA football fan, you’ve heard of it. Last November, the Vanderbilt quarterback sued the NCAA, arguing that the two years he spent playing in junior college before getting a Division I offer shouldn’t count toward his Division I eligibility time, and that the regulations for junior college players who transfer to Division I programs violate anti-trust laws.
“We’re not saying the NCAA can’t have eligibility requirements,” Ryan Downton, Pavia’s attorney told ESPN. “But a junior college season shouldn’t be the equivalent of an NCAA season when the junior college season has no meaningful opportunities to earn NIL, no television exposure.”
Whether or not we agree, Tennessee Federal Judge William Campbell did. He granted Pavia eligibility for one more season. Not two seasons in exchange for those two at the junior college level, but one … which, sure. We’re making it up as we go.
And that’s how we got the NCAA waiver permitting athletes who competed at a non-member school, such as a junior college, to stay eligible in 2025-26.
Great news for Pavia! He could start negotiating NIL deals and prepare for one more season.
And great news too – right? – for a flood of former junior college football players, like the three for West Virginia who will be allowed to compete this season, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. And also for offensive lineman DJ Wingfield and receiver Kaedin Robinson, who thought they would be able to follow Pavia’s lead to USC and UCLA … right?
Well, no. Because it depends in whose court you’re playing. Whether your ref’s got a tight whistle or is one those guys who’ll let ’em play, literally.
Because this week, Wingfield and Robinson – who were banking on using a fifth year of eligibility (and on earning $210,000 and $450,000 NIL contracts, respectively, to play for the Trojans and Bruins, per court documents) – were rejected and summarily retired from collegiate competition by U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna.
On Monday in Santa Ana, the Central District judge sided with the NCAA, which had denied both players’ eligibility waivers this spring.
It came down to the four-seasons-in-five-years rule, which states that student-athletes have five calendar years to complete four years of eligibility.
That might seem straightforward, but it comes with a slew of caveats. Including, now, Pavia’s, which knocks off one of his two years of JUCO service that started in 2020, before he transferred in 2022 to New Mexico State, where he played two seasons before transferring to Vanderbilt last season, then considered a “fifth-year senior.”
In Wingfield’s case, because he enrolled initially at El Camino College in 2019, his clock started earlier. Same for Robinson, who began his junior college career in 2019 at ASA College in Brooklyn.
Never mind that both of those guys – neither of whom were enrolled in 2020 for what we all call the “COVID year,” and both of whom redshirted one season thereafter – have played four full college football seasons to Pavia’s five full seasons, JUCO included.
So, sure, by the letter of the rule, Wingfield (who crucially would have beefed up USC’s offensive line) and Robinson (who would have given new star QB Nico Iamaleava a dependable deep threat) have been at this one year more than Pavia and the five-calendar-year window has closed on them.
But by the spirit of a thing … c’mon. That five-year rule doesn’t apply to athletes who spent time in the armed services, on official religious missions or with recognized foreign aid services. Moreover, it didn’t apply to those Division I athletes who had medical redshirt years and made use of that “COVID year” – the extra year allotted because of the pandemic, which led to truncated schedules and competition without crowds and nothing that the college athletic experience should be.
Take Cam Rising. Utah’s oft-injured star quarterback from Newbury Park announced his retirement from football in May with one year of eligibility remaining, even though he began his college career in 2018.
So the four-in-five deal? Hardly hard and fast. And maybe it should be. But it isn’t – not unless you’re a former JUCO athlete whose journey started humbly, who had been overlooked or late-developing, a talent who needed a proving ground and who perhaps couldn’t afford to walk on at a four-year university to find it.
Who stands to lose a lot if life interrupts plans. To heck with injury redshirts and global pandemics, if you started at a junior college, your runway for playing – and earning – ends when the clock strikes Year 5. Or it can. It depends on who’s behind the plate.
And look, I understand why fans would want to throw up their hands because they hate all of this. Who balk at the big bucks these former amateurs are making. Go ahead, trash the transfer portal. Cry for conferences we’ve loved and lost and pick up a pitchfork to protest the current what-conference-are-they-in-now trivia game we’re all playing.
But what’s fair is fair, and these days, college sports increasingly isn’t.
“Been around him a lot, loved the kid, and just really, really disappointed for him,” said USC coach Lincoln Riley, whose reticence to verbalize his other feelings on the matter Tuesday said plenty, I thought.
“I don’t know if [there are] lessons right now,” he said. “It’s pretty fresh news. I honestly don’t know if I’ve processed it. It’s just – we’ll write a book about it someday.”
On Wednesday morning, UCLA coach DeShaun Foster said, yes, he did find the rulings conflicting: “I believe a kid got cleared with a similar to Kaedin’s situation, so that’s why we felt so positive and good about it. But you never know when it’s outside of football’s hands.”
And, he too, expressed regret for the player who stood to gain so much as a Bruin.
“It sucks,” Foster said. “They’re taking stuff away from the kids.”