The new five-for-five/age-based eligibility rule approved by the NCAA on Tuesday should be, I think, a big help to our UVA Basketball program, which, dating to the Tony Bennett era, has thrived through having guys who hang around the college game all the way through, and now will benefit from having a fifth year to be able to contribute.
I mean, imagine, just for instance, having another year of Joe Harris, or another year of London Perrantes.
Yeah, I need to stop there, because it’s already depressing me along the lines of how the pain of the Elite Eight loss to Syracuse will never go away.
In the immediate term, the two guys on the current roster that this new eligibility rule would most directly impact, in terms of giving them an extra year that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, would be Sam Lewis, Jan Vide and Christian Harmon, a trio of guards who are set to compete as fourth-year college players in the 2026-2027 season.
Because they’re fourth-year players, they would, under the five-for-five part of the new rule, be able to return for a fifth year, thus, the 2027-2028 season, which, interesting, that.
Forward Kalu Anya, who redshirted last season at Saint Louis, will be in his fifth year at the college level in the 2026-2027 season, so, this upcoming season is his final one.
Guard Jurian Dixon, who we would have referred to as a “redshirt junior” under the old system – the new rule effectively renders the concept of redshirting moot going forward – will still get the two years that he would have gotten otherwise, the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 seasons.
Ditto for Elijah Gertude, a combo guard who sat out the 2024-2025 season with an injury, and will have two years remaining – the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 seasons.
Martin Carrere and Silas Barksdale, both of whom had taken redshirt seasons, don’t get them back, unfortunately.
Carrere still has three years left; Barksdale has four.
And as much as we’d love to have power forward Thijs de Ridder around forever, the age component to the new five-in-five rule, which starts counting the five years at the age of 19, will age him out after the 2026-2027 season.
Going forward, then, the younger guys on the roster will also have the opportunity to play out a five-year career.
The biggest beneficiary there is probably Chance Mallory, who I’m not sure projects as an NBA guy, but does project to continue to be a damn good college player, and will only be more so as he takes over as the lead point guard for Ryan Odom, and as such, by the time he’s a fourth- and then fifth-year guy, should be in line to make some serious NIL cash – certainly more cash than he’d make trying to hoof his way into the NBA through the G League or playing overseas.
Johann Grunloh, like Mallory, a second-year player, does project to be an NBA guy, perhaps as soon as next summer’s draft, so I don’t know that this new five-for-five thing necessarily matters to his career one way or the other.
And then, ditto, there, for incoming first-year player Favour Ibe, another guy that is expected at this stage to grow into being an NBA guy.
On the whole, I like the new rule from the perspective of the student-athletes, who get an extra year to earn money at the college level, which also translates to an extra year to either finish up coursework or begin work on a master’s degree.
The rule also gives the system some stability, in setting a clear framework for eligibility, after a run of lawsuits over the past couple of years in which guys have tried to assert the right to additional years that allowed judges in different jurisdictions to issue ad hoc rulings to the benefit of some student-athletes and schools, and against the interests of other student-athletes and schools.
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Chris Graham
