A group of 10 current and former Division I athletes filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Tuesday in Tennessee, per multiple reports, seeking to challenge the organization’s redshirt rule and allow players to play in all five years of their eligibility.
Included among the 10 are two current Vanderbilt football players, senior linebacker Langston Patterson from Nashville and senior defensive lineman Yilanan Ouattara, as well as two former Vandy players — safety CJ Taylor of McMinnville and wide receiver Quincy Skinner Jr. — per Sportico.
Under current NCAA rules, athletes are allowed to compete for four seasons over five years, with the clock starting when the athlete enrolls in college.
One of the five years is reserved for a potential redshirt season.
The attorney for the 10 athletes, Ryan Downton, said the players were not aiming to completely remove the NCAA’s eligibility restrictions, but felt they should be able to compete in all five years while on the team.
“We are not challenging the NCAA’s rule limiting players to five years of eligibility to play college sports or the concept of a defined eligibility period generally,” the athletes’ co-lead counsel, Ryan Downton, said in the complaint, per CBS Sports. “But the NCAA has no basis to prohibit a player who is working just as hard as all of his teammates in practice, in the weight room, and in the classroom, from stepping on the field (or court) to compete against another school in one of those seasons.
“Five years to practice, five years to graduate, five years to play. The NCAA Division II Management Counsel recommended allowing Division II players to compete in all five years earlier this summer. It is time for NCAA Division I to follow suit.”
The NCAA delivered a counterargument in a statement provided to ESPN on Tuesday.
“The NCAA stands by its eligibility rules, including the five-year rule, which enable student-athletes to access the life-changing opportunity to be a student-athlete,” the organization replied in the statement. “The NCAA is making changes to modernize college sports but attempts to dismantle widely supported academic requirements can only be addressed by partnering with Congress.”
Downton is the attorney who represented Diego Pavia last year, when the current Vanderbilt quarterback won a court order that allowed him to gain this year’s additional season of eligibility.
But Pavia’s case was not the same as the current group of 10, as his winning argument centered on the fact that the two years he spent at a junior college — in 2020 and 2021 — should not count toward his eligibility.
