exclusive Why Big East is waiting on adopting new eligibility rules amid NCAA chaos By Zach Braziller Published Oct. 1, 2026, 4:00 p.m. ET Big East Commissioner Tim Brosnan speaks at the 2026 Big East Media Day at the Marriott Marquis in New York, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect For the coming season, the Big East is unlikely to follow the other power conference leagues in adopting new rules that would prevent professional players from returning to college.
A number of players in NFL training camp this summer won a court case in Louisiana that allowed them to return to college for a fifth year following the NCAA’s new age-based eligibility rule that gives athletes five seasons of eligibility over a five-year span. The Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and ACC adopted new parameters that would block any player who had declared for the NFL draft, appeared on an NFL roster, or signed a contract with a pro league.
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Since the Big East doesn’t have football, it didn’t feel the need to act at the time. That hasn’t changed, despite the Big Ten recently announcing this week a unanimous adoption of a rule deeming players who signed professional contracts with the NBA, G-League or WNBA as ineligible to play for any of its schools. The Big 12, SEC and ACC passed similar guidelines for basketball.
“We monitor this day to day. Our perspective is the overall health of the conference, but are we going to inject ourselves into fights that it’s really not our fight, to be candid? No. To prove a point? No,” new commissioner Tim Brosnan told The Post at Big East Media Day on Thursday. “To my mind, these issues that are on the table now, we’ll have an offseason and the intent in the offseason will be to make sure that we draft rules that are consistent with the NCAA and that work for us.”
