Duke's path to their first national title since 2015 just got a bit more treacherous.
Amid a plethora of lawsuits to extend eligibility from the class of 2022 in the wake of the NCAA's new 5-in-5 rule taking effect starting next season, Colorado judge Charlotte Sweeney granted a blanket preliminary injunction to the entire class of 2022, granting another year to all the athletes who exhausted their four years of eligibility in the spring.
Judge Charlotte Sweeney of the U.S. District Court of Colorado has granted a class-wide preliminary injunction that requires the NCAA to declare eligible all high school class of 2022 athletes who exhausted four seasons of eligibility this spring.
— Jamie Shaw (@JamieShaw5) July 31, 2026
👀👀 https://t.co/NlTC6T4hnE
That's unlikely to impact Duke's roster directly. Adding Maliq Brown back would be nice, but he's carving out a path with the San Antonio Spurs.
Scheyer has his roster for next season set. He built it organically through retention, high school recruiting, and then a little sprinkle of the Transfer Portal. That's now being punished.
Some of Duke's biggest competition in the National Championship race will now be able to add potentially game-changing talent to their rosters.
There's not a ton of elite talent available, but there are some key rotational pieces who will now be eligible that could change the title race.
The blanket waiver for the 2022 class is a new hurdle for Jon Scheyer and Duke to clear
Arguably, the two biggest additions will be Florida adding Denzel Aberdeen back and the expected transfer of UCLA's Donovan Dent to Gonzaga.
Aberdeen transferred back to Florida from Kentucky, but had technically used up his four years of eligibility. He'll help shore up a questionable backcourt in Gainesville, ensuring Duke's biggest competition for the National Championship in 2027 just got more difficult to handle.
Gonzaga gets a late mulligan after the surprising departure of expected starting point guard Mario Saint-Supery, who stunningly departed the Bulldogs to sign a professional contract in Spain three weeks ago.
Dent averaged 13.3 points and 7.6 rebounds for UCLA last season, a year after he was a 20-point-per-game scorer at New Mexico. He'll be a game-changer for Mark Few's team.
This move will also allow North Carolina to find some much-needed frontcourt help. They had been in pursuit of Florida's Micah Handlogten, who was exploring an extra year of eligibility via a medical redshirt from a season in which he played in 16 games. He'll no longer need a positive outcome from the NCAA to be able to play next season.
He's not going to swing the Tar Heels toward legitimate contention, but he's a solid player who helps solve a major problem on Michael Malone's first team in Chapel Hill.
This is just a temporary roadblock as the five-in-five rule goes into effect officially next season. But with Scheyer having built arguably his best roster to date in Durham, it's frustrating to see so many teams get late mulligans to fill holes in rosters that weren't properly built.
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