If you’ve perused college hockey Twitter recently, you’ve probably seen some discourse about two topics: the NCAA’s new five-in-five rule, and the potential of college hockey breaking away from the NCAA over it. I’m going to break down what the five-in-five rule is, why hockey hates it, why there’s been chatter about NCAA hockey attempting to form its own league and if that’s even feasible. 

First, you need to understand why the NCAA wants this rule. 

In recent years, the NCAA has found itself in a whole lot of lawsuits. This is mostly because the NCAA operates as an illegal monopoly. All professional sports are monopolies, but they’re legally allowed to operate because they have collective bargaining agreements with the player’s unions of each league. That’s why drafts are legal in sports leagues, but not in your office: you did not sign a CBA agreeing to a draft. 

The NCAA does not have a CBA with college athletes, because it has long held that college athletes are not professional players and, thus, are not entitled to a union. The term “student athlete” was invented specifically to prevent any argument that the players should be paid. For most of its existence, the NCAA and its member schools made millions of dollars off the athletes, who weren’t even allowed to receive a share of sales of jerseys with their names on them, let alone a piece of the TV deal revenue generated from their performances.

So, athletes began suing for those rights (the House case), and, because the NCAA has no CBA with its athletes, the courts view it as an illegal monopoly and frequently ruled against it. We can’t get into all of this, but the NCAA got sued for everything from athletes being able to sign licensing deals to whether seasons played in junior college (JuCo) counted towards their NCAA eligibility. It lost pretty much every case because it was (and still is) operating as an illegal monopoly, and the courts don’t like those. 

Because of redshirt years and the extra year every athlete received due to COVID-19, there are players, particularly in football, that had been in college for six or seven years, which was excessive. Losing the JuCo argument also meant that football and basketball players could spend two years in JuCo and then come play in the NCAA, which the NCAA very badly does not want. It wants its athletes to be perceived as typical students who are not just there for athletics, which is much easier if those athletes are the same age as the other kids in their class. 

(You’ll notice that hockey, which often does this by sending their players to junior or the USHL, did not factor into their calculus. That is something of a theme.) 

Thus, the five-in-five rule was born. In short, it is a rule proposal from the NCAA that would permanently set college athletics eligibility across the board. It would cap an athlete’s college career at five seasons, played across no more than five years. The clock begins either when an athlete graduates, or was supposed to graduate, high school — to discourage holding kids back to get better recruiting — or when the athlete turns 19, whichever comes earlier. If it passes, which it is increasingly likely it will, it will take effect immediately. The redshirt rule will be eliminated and extremely limited exemptions will be applied. The NCAA needs this rule to be standard in all sports to prevent any more lawsuits. 

This rule is horrific for college hockey. It’s bad for most Olympic sports, but it’s particularly bad for college hockey, particularly right after the CHL-NCAA agreement. Most hockey players graduate high school at 18 years old, and often graduate a semester or even a year early due to online schooling systems. In Quebec, they often graduate at 17. Once the player graduates, their eligibility clock starts ticking immediately. 

But college hockey players almost never go to college at 17. There were only three 2008-borns in college hockey last year — Ilya Morozov, Adam Valentini and Keaton Verhoeff. Mike McMahon of College Hockey Insider had this incredible stat: more than 80% of the freshmen class was over 20 years old. 

Hockey is fine with this, though, because everyone plays by those rules. Generally, players who come too early will sit in the press box and then leave the program, or struggle and hurt their confidence and their careers. Teams would rather give the player a year in between high school and starting college hockey where the player gains experience with a junior team and grows their game and is then prepared to start collegiate hockey. 

The players now have two options: come to college at 18 and be prepared to sit and struggle, or take a year or two in junior hockey and come to the NCAA with only three or four years of eligibility. Neither of those are appealing. For the first one, that year is sometimes a player’s draft year, and that scenario would undoubtedly hurt their draft value. 

According to Brad Elliott Schlossman of the Grand Forks Herald, teams are planning on the second option, a.k.a bringing in 19-year-olds with only four years of eligibility. It’s the more reasonable of the two options, as teams don’t want to bring in unprepared players, but if a player gets hurt for a year, they’d be down yet another year of eligibility, which is harmful to their development. 

The players who would be the most hurt by this will be the players who graduated high school this year in 2026 and those who graduate next year in 2027, particularly those players on the bubble of being ready for college hockey. There is no grandfathering them in as the rule applies immediately. 

More than just shortening their college eligibility, it’ll also put them at a disadvantage in recruiting. The 2026 class will only have eligibility through 2031, whereas a senior that graduated last year might have it through 2032 if they exhausted their junior eligibility. If a coach is choosing between the two, they’ll likely take the older player with more experience and more eligibility. The NCAA doesn’t seem inclined to make any exceptions the way it did for the roster caps under House with the implementation of the designated student-athletes that didn’t count against the cap. These classes appear to be getting the very short end of the stick, which is very unfair to them. 

Yes. The coaches and administrators have been working for several weeks on counterproposals and advocating against this rule, because everyone knows how bad it is for the sport. 

If you need an illustration of how unpopular this rule is, I give you something which almost never happens: All 63 D1 NCAA men’s hockey coaches unanimously voted against it. What’s more, the entire hockey ecosystem is basically begging the NCAA not to mess with what’s working in the sport right now. The NHL, USHL, USA Hockey, CHL, NCAA Commissioners Association and the College Hockey Coaches Association all signed onto a letter proposing that the rule be that eligibility begin at age 19 or at the start of college enrollment, whichever comes later. Functionally, it does the same thing, just a year pushed back, and would minimize the damage to college hockey. It’s a decent compromise. 

"We think we've come up with a solution that works for all including hockey," Hockey East commissioner Steve Metcalf said via College Hockey News. "We're not suggesting that hockey can't get a little younger overall, and I understand the optics of seeing a 25- or 26- year old on a roster. We're not asking to preserve the delayed enrollment rule, we're asking for compromise.

Unfortunately, the NCAA does not care. It is primarily concerned with one thing: not having to pay any more lawyers to lose lawsuits in court. Giving hockey an exception could open them up to a lawsuit from a player of another sport seeking a similar deferral, and it’s not interested in the counter-proposal at the moment. 

(There is also an argument that this could open the NCAA up to lawsuits anyway because now student-athletes aren’t allowed to take gap years like every other student? Ivy League schools actually formally encourage gap years, but student-athletes aren’t allowed to take advantage of that suggestion? That hardly seems fair. Formerly, athletes were allowed to defer eligibility one year, while men’s hockey and skiing athletes were allowed to defer for three years. The NCAA could at least keep that.) 

The rule is widely expected to pass and could come into effect as soon as June. For the second time in two years, there will be massive upheaval in the college hockey landscape — but this one seems poised to make the landscape worse.