The NCAA intends to limit Division I athletes to five years of eligibility instead of four, with an age limit also to be put in place.

The NCAA D-I Cabinet voted Tuesday to enact the rule changes, which won’t be fully approved until the group’s meeting ends Wednesday. Rules will take effect at the start of the 2027-28 academic year once finalized, per the NCAA.

The rules apply to all sports and both genders. It will impact schools like UConn down through the mid-majors and the smaller colleges and universities.

Under the plan, there will be no redshirt seasons and no application for waivers to gain extra eligibility, like the NCAA went through this offseason with quarterbacks Diego Pavia and Brendan Sorsby turning to the courts to determine their futures on the football field.

Five years and that is it, beginning with the 2027-28 season.

The NCAA is calling this plan the “age-based eligibility model." Athletes who exhausted their fourth year of eligibility in the 2025-26 season will not see the new rule applied retroactively and will not receive an additional year.

The clock starts ticking on the five years when the athlete enrolls in college or at the start of the academic year after the athlete turns 19, whichever comes first.

The idea behind the rule change is to cut down on the number of athletes playing in their mid-20s or later.

"With these changes, the Cabinet has taken decisive action for the benefit of student-athletes and the system of NCAA Division I athletics," said Josh Whitman, athletic director at Illinois and chair of the Cabinet, in a news release. "For many student-athletes who enroll in college immediately after high school, these changes will result in the opportunity to potentially compete for an additional season in their chosen sport. For campus officials and coaches, this change provides rules that are simpler to administer and easier to predict for roster management decisions."

For UConn and all schools, the rule change means a different way of doing business, and it impacts individual players differently, depending on thier situations.

Look at the very different cases of three notable Huskies and how the rules would have impacted their UConn careers: basketball players Tarris Reed Jr. and Ayanna Patterson, and former UConn quarterback Joe Fagnano.

Tarris Reed Jr.

The center played two seasons at Michigan before transferring to UConn to play for head coach Dan Hurley. He played four seasons, with no redshirts. Reed is not eligible, retroactively, for a fifth season. He is expected to be selected in the NBA draft, perhaps in the first round, when the draft begins Tuesday night.

Ayanna Patterson

The 6-foot-2 forward from Indiana came to UConn from the high school Class of 2022, in which she was rated as the No. 1 wing and the No. 4 overall prospect by ESPN.

In her freshman season, Patterson played in 30 games, averaging 10.1 minutes. She scored 65 points and pulled down 67 rebounds. The promise was there for the future, but she missed the following two seasons because of injuries. She returned last season and played limited minutes in 30 games.

Patterson played as true freshman, took a medical redshirt and her freshman redshirt in the two seasons she missed, and returned as a redshirt sophomore in 2025-26.

She has transferred to Kentucky, where she will have two seasons remaining – giving her six in all. Incoming athletes will be limited to five.

Joe Fagnano

His story is similar to Patterson’s. Fagnano enrolled at Maine in 2019 and spent three seasons there, including the 2020 COVID-19 season, for which he gained another season of eligibility.

He transferred to UConn ahead of the 2023 season with two seasons remaining – even though he already had spent four years in college. He already had taken his freshman redshirt and also got a do-over for the COVID year, granted to all players.

Then came his first season with the Huskies, in which he was ruled out for the season due to injury after just two games. That became a medical redshirt year with five seasons now in college.

He played two more for a total of seven. By the time he left UConn – he signed with the Baltimore Ravens as an undrafted free agent – he was 25. Under the new rules, there will be no more 25-year-olds.

And then there is Marine Dursus, an incoming freshman from France. She will turn 21 in August as she begins her college career, which would cut her eligibility in the future because of the age limit. The international recruits will need to commit earlier.

This seems like a win-win proposal as the NCAA tries to regain control of a college sports landscape that isn’t anywhere like what it was a decade ago. Expect more changes to follow.

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