Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed an executive order allowing the state's colleges and universities to grant Class of 2022 athletes an additional year of eligibility — a move that places Ohio at odds with existing NCAA rules.

Under the NCAA's updated eligibility framework, which shifted to a five-years-to-play-five-seasons structure, athletes from one particular cohort were left without protection: those who had already exhausted four years of play found their eligibility cut off, while the cohorts immediately before and after them each received an additional season under the new arrangement.

The executive order removed the authority of Ohio's public and private schools to enforce policies excluding those athletes from competition. The directive stops short of mandating that schools add those athletes to their rosters, instead extending the choice to individual institutions. In a statement distributed to media outlets, DeWine noted that shifting rules must still account for fairness, and that Ohio's student-athletes deserve access to the same opportunities available to their peers in other states. The governor's office issued a statement on the matter.

Jim Tressel, who had led Ohio State's football program as head coach, expressed backing for the proposal on the grounds that student-athletes in the state deserved access to the same options open to those competing elsewhere. That position was met the same day by a letter from NCAA president Charlie Baker to member institutions, in which Baker maintained that setting eligibility standards fell outside DeWine's authority and that allowing a single elected official to draw up separate rules for schools within that official's own jurisdiction put the fairness of athletic competition at risk.

A federal lawsuit targeting the executive order was filed by the NCAA, with the organisation contending that the directive runs counter to both the U.S. Constitution and applicable state law, naming DeWine as the defendant. Three distinct forms of legal remedy — injunctive relief, declaratory relief, and a third related claim — are being pursued by the NCAA through the courts.

At the core of the legal filing is a Commerce Clause challenge, with the NCAA contending that Ohio schools receive a preferential position under the order that other states' institutions do not. The filing further contends that the directive hands Ohio schools a constitutional shield under the First Amendment, allowing them to remain within the NCAA's membership while disregarding its governing rules.

The NCAA contended that extending eligibility to the 2022 recruiting class would disadvantage other student-athletes currently competing. In a statement, the organisation said that allowing individual states or courts to alter competition rules on a piecemeal basis would undermine equal footing across all programmes, and that federal legislation — specifically the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act — represented the appropriate path forward rather than a fragmented legal process. The organisation also expressed that it respected the careers of those whose eligibility concluded in the 2025–26 academic year.

The NCAA also pressed lawmakers to advance the Protect College Sports Act, pointing to what it described as a fragmented landscape of inconsistent rulings playing out state by state and court by court, while the group of athletes who entered college in 2022 remains at the heart of the underlying conflict. The Ohio case is among a number of eligibility-related lawsuits filed at various courts around the country, with opponents of the extension arguing that granting athletes an unanticipated fifth year of competition would confer an advantage those players had no grounds to foresee, at the expense of other student-athletes waiting for roster spots.