The NCAA tilted the field for the class of 2022, so spare me the level playing field speech

The NCAA spent Thursday night telling its members how disappointed it was that about two dozen basketball players get to play a fifth season. I'd feel worse for it if it hadn't built this mess with its own hands. It wrote a five-season rule in June, left one graduating class out of it, and now it wants to lecture Ohio about a level playing field. The field's crooked because the NCAA tilted it.

You know the headline. The Ohio Supreme Court filed an order Thursday that keeps the players in Borovicanin v. NCAA eligible, the AP reported, and Xavier's Filip Borovicanin opens his season Monday. Gonzaga's Javon Bennett, Cincinnati's MJ Collins and Auburn's Kolby King are in the case too. The NCAA's legal office answered with a memo that said "every minute played by an ineligible player is an opportunity deprived to an eligible student-athlete."

Ineligible according to whom, though? The new rule gives athletes five seasons in five years, with the clock starting at 19 or at first full-time enrollment, but only for athletes who still had eligibility left on Aug. 1. The players' argument in court was simple. The classes before them got extra seasons through the COVID waiver, and the classes after them get five under the new model. The 2022 class played its four and gets nothing more. Yahoo put it about as plainly as you can: those players were left without the fifth year available to the classes around them.

I'll give the other side its due, because it has a real argument and a court bought it. Ohio's First District Court of Appeals ruled on Oct. 2 that the record didn't show the NCAA acting arbitrarily. The NCAA's cabinet voted unanimously not to make the rule retroactive, and the conference commissioners backed that, worried about roster chaos for kids who'd picked schools based on where a spot would open. That's not a silly worry. Every minute a fifth-year forward plays is a minute some freshman doesn't. And Charlie Baker has a point when he says one elected official making rules for his own schools is "a terrible way to run athletic competitions." Gov. Mike DeWine gave Ohio schools that option by executive order this month, and the NCAA sued him in federal court for it.

Here's why none of that moves me. The commissioners talked about honoring the settled expectations of players who knew they only had four seasons. Settled is a funny word to hear from the people who rewrote the eligibility rule in June. I've been in enough press boxes to know nothing in college sports has been settled for years, and I'm fine with that, but you don't get to change the rules for everybody and then tell one class that its expectations are the ones frozen in place.

The waiver process isn't the safety valve either. The appeals court record shows only four of the 24 plaintiffs even applied for one, and Borovicanin was turned down three times.

So if anybody asked me, and nobody has, I'd have the membership vote one fifth year for the class of 2022 and be done with it. It's one class. After this season the problem graduates on its own. Instead the NCAA is going to spend the winter fighting a governor and dozens of lawsuits to defend a line it drew in June. If it wins every one of them, it'll have spent a season and a pile of legal fees proving it had the right to treat one class worse than the classes on either side of it. I'd be embarrassed to win that.

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