The Fifth Year Nobody Can Give Everyone
Five Syracuse lacrosse players want another season. Joey Spallina, Billy Dwan III, Luke Rhoa, Michael Leo and Finn Thomson filed in Denver District Court asking for one more year of eligibility, and they attached themselves to a nine-plaintiff suit that includes football players from Colorado State, Utah State and UConn.
The first thing you notice is where it was filed. Five players from central New York, a program in Syracuse, and a courtroom in Colorado. The filing explains that the plaintiffs’ contacts with Colorado come out of their participation in the NCAA system whose eligibility rules they’re challenging. That’s the hook. It’s not unusual and it’s not improper, but it tells you something about the shape of this litigation. Nine plaintiffs from five schools in three sports found a jurisdiction and a lawyer, and the lacrosse players joined a football case because a football case was already going there.
What’s more interesting is how little they ask for once they get inside.
The Narrowest Possible Ask
The filing disclaims almost everything. The players say they aren’t trying to invalidate the NCAA’s eligibility model. They aren’t asking for an automatic fifth season for everybody in the high school class of 2022. They aren’t touching the House settlement’s revenue sharing. They aren’t asking to skip academic, conduct or transfer requirements. What they want is permission for themselves, and only where a school voluntarily wants them, has an open roster spot, and can take them without displacing a current player or a 2026 recruit.
Gary Gait has said on the record that Syracuse wants each of them back and has room.
That combination is engineered, and it works. Judges granting injunctions have to weigh who gets hurt. If the coach says there’s space and nobody gets bumped, the request looks harmless. Ask a judge for a fifth year for every fourth-year senior in Division I and the same analysis produces thousands of displaced recruits and a very different answer.
Two Doors, And People Keep Mixing Them Up
There are two ways a fifth year happens, and they produce opposite results.
The first is a courtroom. An injunction covers the people who filed and nobody else. That’s the design, not a loophole. In the Ohio case decided July 9, Hamilton County Judge Christopher Wagner ordered the NCAA to grant a fifth year to the 24 basketball players who sued him for it. Not the class of 2022. Those 24. Their own attorney followed the win by publicly asking the NCAA to extend the same treatment to every similarly situated athlete from that class in every sport, which tells you exactly what the ruling did and didn’t accomplish.
The second door is the NCAA deciding on its own. And here’s the part that gets lost: the NCAA cannot hand a fifth year to five specific players. It doesn’t have that button. Eligibility relief comes out of Board and Council votes and applies to categories of athletes. If the NCAA blinks, it blinks for everyone who fits the description.
It Already Happened Once
December 2024. A federal judge in Tennessee gave Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia another season. That order covered Pavia and only Pavia. Five days later the Division I Board of Directors approved a blanket waiver for every athlete in the same position, extending an extra year to anyone who had competed at a non-NCAA school and would otherwise have been out of eligibility after 2024-25. Hundreds of former junior college players got a season out of it.
The NCAA didn’t do that out of kindness. It did it for competitive fairness, which in practice meant it couldn’t stomach one quarterback playing on a court order while identical athletes watched from the stands.
It paid for the decision, too. The NCAA appealed Pavia’s injunction the same day it announced the waiver. By October, the Sixth Circuit dismissed that appeal as moot, reasoning that Pavia already had everything he was asking for, so there was nothing left to fix. The association gave away its shot at a favorable ruling to protect competitive balance. And because the waiver only covered athletes finishing that particular year, more than three dozen lawsuits followed from the players it left out.
Why This Time Is Different
The NCAA is not blinking now.
It asked Wagner to pause his injunction while it appealed, and he refused, writing that the NCAA is subject to the results of its own decisions. The First District Court of Appeals has set an accelerated briefing schedule and ordered the parties to address whether it even has jurisdiction. No waiver has been offered to anybody.
The reason is money. An extra junior college year in 2024 was close to free. A fifth year for the class of 2022 runs directly into roster caps and revenue sharing under the House settlement, which means every returning player takes a paid roster spot from someone who was already promised one. The NCAA has said plainly that it wrote the new rule to apply going forward precisely because of what retroactive relief would do to other athletes.
So the association is choosing litigation over accommodation, which is the opposite of what it chose eighteen months ago. That’s a rational calculation and it’s also the thing that guarantees the outcome nobody should want.
The Lottery With A Filing Fee
Grant the class of 2022 a fifth year and everyone in it is treated the same. Deny all of them and everyone in it is treated the same. Neither answer is obviously right, but both are defensible.
What’s happening instead is neither. Under case-by-case relief, the extra season goes to players whose coach will state in a legal filing that he has room, and who found a lawyer before August. Spallina gets a year because Gait said yes on the record. A fourth-year midfielder with the identical eligibility history at a program that already filled its roster gets nothing, and the difference between them has nothing to do with the merits of the rule either one is living under.
There’s one more thing the Syracuse filing doesn’t mention. Four of the five plaintiffs signed three-year rookie contracts in the Premier Lacrosse League and have been playing all summer. Spallina has 26 points in seven games and is a Rookie of the Year candidate. Thomson signed with the Redwoods in June. The document runs through roster capacity, academic standing and conduct requirements at length. It never gets to the paychecks.
The narrow ask is smart lawyering. It’s also an argument that the fifth year should be distributed by access rather than by rule, and that’s harder to defend than the rule everyone is suing over.
Bottom Line
The Syracuse players are more likely to lose than to win, and the reason isn’t the eligibility rule. It’s the paychecks. Every one of these cases rests on the claim that being denied a fifth year causes irreparable economic harm, and four of the five plaintiffs are currently drawing salaries to play lacrosse professionally. Spallina has 26 points in seven games this summer. A judge in Denver is going to ask what exactly is being lost, and the filing’s decision to say nothing about the PLL contracts suggests the plaintiffs’ own lawyer doesn’t have a clean answer. The timing hurts too. Football and basketball plaintiffs walked in with seasons starting in weeks and got fast rulings because judges felt the clock. Lacrosse doesn’t start until February, which gives a court every reason to deny interim relief and set an ordinary schedule that runs past the point where any of this matters.
And if they win, they win alone. The filing asks for individualized relief and disclaims a fifth season for the rest of the class of 2022, so a favorable ruling covers five names and binds nobody else. The NCAA has already shown how it plans to handle that. It let the Ohio injunction stand for three weeks without extending the same treatment to anyone outside that courtroom, refused to blink even after plaintiffs’ counsel asked publicly, and is spending its money on appeals instead of accommodation. It learned from Pavia that a blanket waiver buys peace at the cost of your own appeal, and with roster caps and revenue sharing now attached to every returning player, peace has gotten expensive. Which leaves the fifth year going to whoever has a coach willing to put roster space in writing and a lawyer willing to file by August. That isn’t a rule. It’s a raffle, and the NCAA is going to lose in court a few more times before it admits that’s what it built.
