Duke football coach Manny Diaz says the NCAA’s current mess has created a system where nobody seems to know what the rules really are - and that uncertainty is bleeding into everything from transfer eligibility to NIL.
With college basketball set to tip off Monday night and the five-in-five rule still being fought over by players in court, Diaz painted a picture of a college sports landscape that feels impossible to pin down. The bigger problem, he said, is that the rules aren’t just unclear - they keep changing depending on who you ask and which conference is involved.
“You might as well go to a fortune cookie,” Diaz said, H/T On3. “I mean, it doesn’t matter who you go to.
Like, I mean, it’s just because no one knows right now. There’s really no one that can definitively say, ‘Hey, listen.’
You know, you saw the Big Ten try to pass a rule yesterday. No one knows if that’s going to stand up in the court of law.
And ultimately, that’s the issue, right?
“The issue is our rules are being litigated in courtrooms, and so we’re always bouncing from one ruling to the next ruling, and then somebody will make a ruling, and then we have to, that has to survive appeal, and so it’s just it’s just really, really difficult. And then that’s why people have capitalized on it.
Just, you know, people who don’t want the rules to change that are on top right now because they’re just the big spenders. They’re the most quiet ones because they don’t want the system to change, and right now they feel like they’ve got it changed.”
Diaz’s comments land in a moment when the NCAA’s grip on the sport feels shaky at best. The source of the problem, as he sees it, is that the rules are being sorted out in court rather than settled on the field or in the conference offices.
That’s why the whole thing has turned into a moving target. One ruling gets handed down, then another follows, and then everything has to hold up through appeal. In the meantime, schools are left trying to operate inside a system that doesn’t seem to have a stable center.
The reality, as the reporting notes, is that the NCAA isn’t exactly stepping in and cracking down across the board. That leaves schools in a strange spot: keep pushing until someone stops you, or play it safe while everyone else tests the edges.
For Duke and others around the country, the temptation is obvious. If the line keeps shifting and enforcement stays loose, why not keep pressing until the NCAA says otherwise?
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