By Dana O’Neil, CNN
Lexington, Kentucky (CNN) — Mark Pope is not like most college basketball coaches.
It has nothing to do with his Rhodes Scholar candidacy or the three years he spent at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, intent on becoming a doctor.
No, the great separator between Pope and his peers is that he is an optimist. He sees sunshine while everyone else dodges raindrops. He embraces hope instead of giving in to despair. And this season, while everyone else is Eeyore-ing about, morosely shuffling to work as if they are being asked to dig ditches with a spoon, Pope leans back into a chair at a conference-room table inside his University of Kentucky basketball offices and says the single craziest thing anyone has said to date about college basketball in 2026.
“It’s the best time to be a coach, man,” he says. “It’s gotta be, right?”
The punch line does not come. He is dead serious.
To be clear, college basketball is a hot mess. This is not an opinion. Months after Lane Kiffin threatened near-anarchy by attempting to use the court system to run an end-around the eligibility rules, college hoops is effectively saying, “Hold my beer.”
There are currently 54 players competing in the SEC, Big Ten, Big East, ACC and Big 12 thanks to temporary restraining orders that granted them relief to play an additional fifth year. Another 15 others have not been cleared despite similar attempts. The court systems have made such a mockery of roster construction that Sports Illustrated went so far as to create a tracker showing who can and cannot play and how each case was decided.
It does not, however, account for the international players who have been given the OK after competing in various overseas pro leagues and are, at best, well past the expired date for typical college-aged students. Nor does it account for the endless number of players who have changed school jerseys via the traditional transfer portal.
“We are at the forefront of the chaotic instability,” Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington told CNN Sports before the season started. “We’re leading it.”
The chaos has created an orange-dimpled Venn diagram. On one side sit the teams and coaches that have fully embraced the chaos (think LSU’s Will Wade) and on the other are those who have given it the stiff arm (hello, Michigan State’s Tom Izzo). In the gray lives the rest: those who are either morally opposed but competitively willing, or morally indifferent and competitively willing.
“It’s a constantly changing landscape,” says Gonzaga’s Mark Few, who has added two fifth-year players and is waiting on a third. “One thing I’ve tried to focus on is how do you serve Gonzaga the best, and how do you put the best team on the floor and the best product out there and stick to our core values and protect our culture?”
A long history in the gray area of morality
College basketball has long lived in the gray. Those waxing nostalgic for the good old days might want to check their rose-colored lenses.
The phonebook thickness of what once was the NCAA rulebook was largely written by college basketball coaches who cleverly found ways to exploit loopholes, when they weren’t skirting them altogether. This is the sport in which an envelope stuffed with cash put Kentucky on probation and a fixer hanging with players in a hot tub did the same at UNLV.
As toothless as the FBI investigation into college hoops wound up being, people still went to jail for paying players under the table and long before he made end-around offers, Will Wade made “strong ass” ones on a wiretap.
“I have a few older guys on my staff – Rick Ray, Rodney Terry – and I’ll say to them, ‘This is the craziest time in college basketball,” Byington says. “They just look at me and laugh and say, ‘It’s not even close.”
The difference is now the bending – or breaking – of the rules via a court order. The NCAA’s decision to pivot to a five-in-five model (essentially allowing college athletes five years of eligibility) was widely lauded. It ends the endless waiver requests that had besieged sports, and puts a cap, if you will, on how long a person can stay in college.
But the national office adopted the rule in June, slightly messy for college football but an abject disaster for hoops. The new legislation arrived on the same day of the NBA Draft, too late for would-be fifth years to reconsider their decisions to go pro, and just early enough that those who did go through the process hadn’t fully signed contracts or made deals to head overseas.
That purgatory left such enough wiggle room to argue the timing was entirely unfair.
And so came the lawsuits, waves of them, with players seeking an extension of their college careers – not because they missed campus but because, for many, NIL deals would be far more lucrative than whatever a pseudo-professional deal might look like.
Suddenly coaches accustomed to studying ball-screens, became paralegals.
Pope can recite chapter and verse on the differences between the TRO rulings in the case brought in California versus Ohio. Florida coach Todd Golden, whose father is an attorney, willingly went deep into the weeds to understand the various cases.
“I believe it’s my job as a leader of this program to know what we’re up against, what we’re arguing and fighting for,” Golden said at SEC media day. “I’ve taken a pretty big legal interest in what we’re going through here in college sports.”
The head-spinning world of building a roster
While the courts were ruling on fifth-year players, the NCAA was working through complicated international players, and the portal was sifting its usual numbers through its window (2,500 or so entered). Taken together, it all made roster construction, once the very backbone of building a successful program, feel more like a blindfolded dart contest.
Teams aren’t being built so much as assembled; they’re more like Lincoln logs prone to quick crumbling than Legos snapped into place with some semblance of stability.
“You’re always making educated guesses on the team you’re putting together,” Pope said. “It’s just now you’re making an educated guess on the court system. You’re trying to dig into where the case is going, looking for trends and trying to understand how your league is going to respond. It’s not just educated guesses on what players you want to take into your program; it’s on the rules.”
It is, however, head-spinning. Duke Brennan played at Grand Canyon two seasons ago, Villanova last year and now is at Oklahoma. Xaivian Lee spent three seasons at Princeton, last year at Florida and is now at Gonzaga.
Traveling: It’s not just a whistle anymore.
Will Wade had four players on his roster as recently as September; now he has 14. Trey Kaufman-Renn announced he’d transfer from Purdue to Kansas in mid-October as he sought a sixth year of eligibility. He didn’t play in the Jayhawks’ exhibition game but entered in the second half in the season opener against Fordham.
Just last week – and a day before its second game of the season – Saint Louis learned that Robbie Avila, the goggle-wearing “Cream Abdul Jabaar,” was cleared to play. And then before he could suit up for his first game, the College Sports Commission said Avila was out. Where once the NCAA limited scholarships, now it sets roster spots.
The Billikens had a full roster, and the CSC ruled they could not add Avila to the list.
And then there is the most amusing twist of all. In August, Mark Mitchell, who had played at Missouri, committed to Kentucky after receiving a TRO. But the SEC ruled that Mitchell couldn’t transfer because he didn’t enter the portal during the typical window (he was, at the time, making a go at the NBA Draft). Mitchell returned to Mizzou but the Kentucky Court of Appeals dissolved his TRO.
In October, a Kentucky judge reversed the reversal. He’s eligible to play for the Tigers and, in fact, will face Kentucky in January.
“That’s the risk when you go all in,” Pope says philosophically. “That’s the fascinating part, really. There are so many dynamics at work and it changes every day.”
Instant experience
Equally interesting: Who is taking the risks is who isn’t. Among those ranked in the preseason top 10, six schools (Duke, Illinois, UConn, Michigan State, Texas and Virginia) didn’t even try to add players via the courts, three others (Arizona, Tennessee and Houston) tried and failed to add just one extra fifth-year and Florida brought in just Denzel Aberdeen.
The numbers may explain why some of the best teams aren’t going all in. About a decade ago, Ken Pomeroy added continuity to his famed stats. It’s a complex matrix but essentially boils down to how much a roster has played together. Of the six schools opting out of fifth-year players altogether, all but Texas rank in the top 100 in continuity.
to his team). Not only were older players adding significantly more value, but their variability was also considerably less. As a group, veteran players were consistently more valuable than talented freshmen.
And that’s the real driving force behind all of this. Throughout whatever iteration has come its way, college basketball’s one consistent is that experience wins. Only one national champion in the last decade – UConn in 2023 – has failed to rank in the top 100 in either continuity or Division I experience per KenPom.
But getting old takes time and plenty of coaches aren’t so sure they have it. Look at that list again. The common thread: Job security.
Izzo, Golden and Dan Hurley each have won a national title and Jon Scheyer and Brad Underwood have taken Duke and Illinois respectively to a Final Four. Ryan Odom is only in his second year at Virginia, but the Cavaliers exist by being an outlier to the usual way of doing business in college basketball.
So many others – not all but many – feeling the squeeze of instant satisfaction from itchy fan bases and twitchy administrations, or the march of their own internal professional clocks, are opting to fast-track experience. Fifth-year players, thereby, became very attractive in this loophole season for the same reason that portal players have been appealing for years now. They are microwavable versions of experience.
The only real question, of course, is will it work? Come April in Detroit, will a championship-winning coach have to thank his local circuit judge along with his administration? Will a court order find its way into Springfield?
“I am so fascinated to see how this all shakes out,” Pope says. “I mean, really? How much fun is this?”
He was being rhetorical, but he was also being serious.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
Inside the ‘chaotic instability’ defining college basketball’s Wild, Wild West era News Channel 3-12.
Hence then, the article about inside the chaotic instability defining college basketball s wild wild west era was published today ( ) and is available on News channel ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Inside the ‘chaotic instability’ defining college basketball’s Wild, Wild West era )
Also on site :
- In 1950, Snoopy Made His Comic Strip Debut—Today, His 76-Year Legacy Lives On in Costco’s $40 Holiday Plush Set
- ‘Ebenezer’ First Reactions: Johnny Depp’s Hollywood Comeback is a ‘Wickedly Fun Holiday Treat’ That Adds ‘Refreshing New Layers’ to the Christmas Classic
- In 1929, Memphis Minnie recorded a song about the Great Mississippi Flood; 42 years later, Led Zeppelin turned it into a timeless blues rock anthem