About Eligibility Decoder
Eligibility Decoder is an independent, plain-English guide to the NCAA's new five-year, age-based eligibility model. When the rule was adopted on June 23, 2026, the coverage was everywhere — but it was scattered across articles and written for reporters, not for the athletes, parents and coaches trying to answer one question: how many years do I have left?
So we built the thing that didn't exist: a clean checker plus straight explainers, grounded only in what the NCAA actually published.
We are not affiliated with the NCAA, any school, conference, or athletics body, and we don't make eligibility determinations — your school's compliance office does. We just make the rule easy to understand.
What this site does
Everything here is built around the one question above. The eligibility checker walks you through the inputs the five-year model actually turns on and tells you what the published rule implies for your situation. Around it sit plain-English explainers: the rule itself, how it differs from the model it replaced, what happened to redshirts, what it means if you are already competing, how transfers, JUCO and international routes are treated, and when the change takes effect. The FAQ collects the questions athletes, parents and coaches keep asking.
What this site does not do
It does not decide anything. Eligibility is certified by your institution's compliance office, and only they can apply the rule to your full record — your transcript, your terms of attendance, your competition history and any waiver on file. Nothing here is legal advice. Treat the output as a way to walk into that conversation already knowing which questions matter, not as a ruling you can rely on.
The rule is also being litigated, and parts of it are subject to court orders that have changed since it was adopted. Where that affects the answer we say so on the page, with the date the note was written, so you can tell how current it is.
How we source it
The explainers are grounded in what the NCAA and the courts have actually published — not in reporting about them. Every substantive claim traces back to a primary document, and those documents are listed on Sources & Method, which also describes how the checker computes its answer and where that computation stops. If a question cannot be answered from a published source, we say it is unresolved rather than guess.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed rather than defended. Errors in the checker's logic are treated as the most serious kind, because they are the ones a person might act on: an off-by-one in the age calculation was corrected on July 12, 2026. If you spot one, the Sources & Method page is the right place to start — it shows the reasoning the answer came from.