You know, I remember when the hearing happened in early July, walking out of the courtroom and thinking to myself, "Okay, what happens if the Ohio case, if those players are denied the ability to play, but the players in the Tennessee case or California, wherever, if some states win and some states lose, the NCAA is gonna have a mess on its hands." And guess what? Here we are on September 8th, and that is exactly what's happened.

happened.That is exactly what's going on, because, uh, you know, the current landscape if you look at it, you know, the federal class action lawsuit which would have applied to everybody, it's been stayed.

It's, it, it's on hold right now.

They're gonna finish up briefing, um, you know, at the end of this week.

But, um, we don't know when, when the 10th Circuit's gonna make a decision.

We don't know whether the 10th Circuit's going to, uh, you know, reverse the injunction and, and, you know, kind of send it back to the district court to, to figure out later.

We don't know kind of the precise reasons why they would do so, um, you know, which may or may not give those, those plaintiff's attorneys the ability to kind of maybe refile a, a motion for preliminary injunction and figure that out there.

At some point it feels like, maybe not, but at some point, right, it does feel like you have to have some sort of a decision where you can't have half the sport or half the power conference teams with guys that are playing under these rules, and half the guys that aren't, right? I mean, it seems ridiculous.

Sort of take me through the conference's input in this whole five for five thing and how I guess how that will be implemented.

Yeah, I think the first thing to kind of go over and the first thing to really talk about with all this is that.

It's really notable and really interesting and really telling.

This class of 2022 stuff, the stuff with this particular group of athletes that, as judges have been finding left and right, at least district court judges have been finding left and right, would be within their five-year clocks and would be eligible if the NCAA extended their new rules that are now in place to them.

This is a unique situation.

This is a very, very unique situation.

It's one where judges, again, are just willing to extend a lot more latitude and do a lot more for kind of at the expense of the NCAA and at the expense of the NCAA's kind of commitment to self-governance, really to put a bow on it.

yeah

Um, with this being just one instance of many eligibility lawsuits that we're currently seeing, and frankly, a lot of alignment from judges granting these temporary injunctions, uh, what do you see as maybe the end results of all of these lawsuits, and how is the NCAA trying to maybe consolidate some of them and work through them all?

Yeah, that's a really good question because, you know, y- y- you mentioned, you know, the idea that there's a lot of judicial alignment on this.

Um, when we ...

You know, the, the, the, the initial wave of eligibility lawsuits, you know, we've seen this since Diego Pavia, where, you know, you saw athletes suing over JuCo rules or Division II rules or, you know, just a- against the Four Seasons or against really everything else.

Um, you know, we, we saw a lot of inconsistency.

We saw a lot of judges disagreeing with each other.

You saw a lot of judges ...

And I, I'm curious if, if you think that this is maybe a case study for conference enforcement maybe being the strongest area of enforcement that can be applied at this point in, in college athletics.