Hoops Players’ Win Tops Big Day in NCAA Eligibility Litigation

Xavier basketball player Filip Borovicanin and 23 other college basketball players were awarded an injunction by an Ohio judge to play college hoops this fall, hours after three players petitioned a judge in Tennessee to be able to play another season.

These players are from the high school class of 2022 and maintain it is illegal for the NCAA to deny them eligibility for another season when its new eligibility rules permit others to play a fifth season.

The core of the dispute rests in the NCAA Division I Cabinet last month unanimously approving a system that provides five years of eligibility beginning at the start of the academic year following an athlete’s 19th birthday or upon full-time enrollment in college, whichever comes sooner. The rule does not apply to college athletes from the high school class of 2022 who didn’t redshirt as freshmen, even though these athletes, as Borovicanin insists, “spent four years competing against athletes who received an extra year through COVID-era waivers.”

Led by attorneys Darren Heitner and Ryan Downton, Borovicanin’s group argues that the NCAA has breached obligations owed to them in the Division I Manual. The alleged breaches center on assurances of fundamental fairness, good faith and consistency. They also portray the NCAA as hypocritical in rendering them ineligible while allowing former G League players and other ex-pros to play.

Hamilton County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas Judge Christopher Wagner agreed with some of the players’ arguments and granted an injunction that prevents the NCAA from ruling the players ineligible.

Judge Wagner found it problematic that the NCAA waited until June to determine new eligibility rules since that delay left the players’ “status in question until June 2026.”

The judge also concluded there is a sufficient contractual nexus between the NCAA and the athletes, since “the NCAA cannot exist without student-athletes,” because “student-athletes can now be paid directly by NCAA member schools,” and because the NCAA Manual includes language about protecting student-athletes’ well-being. He was not persuaded by NCAA arguments that the manual is not a contract between the NCAA and students who play varsity sports.

Judge Wagner further opined it is “arbitrary and capricious” for the NCAA to exclude the players in question. He found it was permissible for students who graduated high school prior to 2022 to receive COVID waivers and play a fifth season without redshirting, but not for the class of 2022.

Judge Wagner noted that he was informed by testimony given by Xavier men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino, Akron men’s basketball coach Dustin Ford and Cincinnati men’s basketball coach Jerrod Calhoun.

In a statement shared with Sportico, the NCAA said it will immediately appeal the ruling. The statement argued that Judge Wagner “disregarded over a century of precedent and substituted its own judgment, on a limited factual record, for the collective expertise of the nation’s leading higher education institutions,” and criticized the judge for allegedly basing his decision “on assertions by plaintiffs’ counsel about the NCAA and its bylaws that bear no resemblance to reality.”

The NCAA also noted that plaintiffs will “take away valuable participation opportunities from student-athletes who are eligible to compete, in favor of those who have already received exactly the number of seasons of competition they expected.”

Turning to Tennessee, Nebraska long snapper Kevin Gallic, Wisconsin long snapper Nick Levy and Wisconsin kicker Nathanial Vakos are central to a new court filing in Tennessee federal court on Thursday. 

The trio completed their fourth seasons during the 2025–26 academic year and were non-redshirt seniors. They maintain their ineligibility is an antitrust problem.

Gallic, Levy and Vakos are also prospective pro players who have already been in contact with NFL teams about potential employment.

Gallic worked out with the New York Giants in April and is scheduled to attend free-agent camps later this month. Vakos was invited to attend the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ rookie minicamp, though he was passed over for a veteran kicker. Levy, meanwhile, was in contention to sign with the Washington Commanders, but that signing didn’t materialize.

None of the three is currently eligible to play another season of D-I football. 

In a brief authored by Downton as well as Salvador Hernandez (Riley & Jacobson) and Christopher Wilson (Baker Botts), the three players demand their own injunction.

Gallic, Levy and Vakos stress time is of the essence, as they have “mere weeks” to take on expected roster spots before the 2026 college football season begins. The trio also maintain that the chance to play another season is virtually essential for them to have a good chance to join the NFL.

As described in the brief, these players were “within arm’s reach of securing spots on NFL rosters” in recent weeks and months. As the players tell it, “another season of FBS football would provide an irreplaceable opportunity” to further their skills as well as “produce game film, participate in all-star events and receive live evaluation from professional scouts.”

The filing is part of the existing case, Langston Patterson v. NCAA, where several D-I football players (including Gallic, Levy and Vakos) argue that if college athletes have five years to practice and five years to graduate, they should have five years to play. Under the old system, football players could play up to four regular seasons plus postseason games in a redshirt year without the season counting against the four-season cap. Those players could also participate in practices, workouts and other team activities for five years. The Patterson plaintiffs maintain that losing out on another season deprives them of potential NIL income, revenue-sharing payments, scholarship money and educational benefits.

In January, U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. denied the Patterson plaintiffs an injunction, in part because he was unpersuaded that the labor market for D-I FBS football is meaningfully impacted by the exclusion of some players and, correspondingly, the inclusion of others.

But on Thursday, Gallic, Levy and Vakos insisted that the college sports landscape is now quite different than it was in January. Most relevantly, they assert, the NCAA changed the rules at issue in Patterson so that more athletes can continue to play.

To that point, the trio maintain there is no valid reason to exclude non-redshirt players who played their fourth season in 2025–26 while now allowing football players who similarly enrolled in college in the fall of 2022 and who took a redshirt year. They also question why they can’t continue playing when college athletes who graduated high school in 2022 and then played professionally, or who completed a postgraduate year at a high school, can keep playing.

The arguments raised by Gallic, Levy and Vakos have been advanced in other cases across the country over the last couple of weeks. On Tuesday, Sportico detailed those cases. They could lead to conflicting rulings in different jurisdictions and thus result in some colleges being able to play athletes who have exhausted their NCAA eligibility while others are denied that chance. For example, while Borovicanin’s group has won an injunction, similarly situated players in other courts might lose.

The NCAA has raised a number of defenses, including that, through its membership rule-making process, it has the right to determine eligibility requirements for college students to play sports.

Other defenses include that if players like Gallic, Levy and Vakos become eligible this fall, they would take roster spots that incoming freshmen and transfers are expecting to fill. Along those lines, the NCAA has asserted that, to the extent college sports is populated by athletes who stick around long after their classmates graduate and move on to another phase of life, college sports could morph into something akin to minor league sports, which would be more difficult to market.