Steve Lutz has spent enough time around college basketball to know the job has changed. At Oklahoma State, that change now includes something far beyond recruiting, development and game-planning: keeping up with lawsuits, eligibility fights and the maze around NIL.
That reality is sitting right in the middle of the Cowboys’ offseason. Sam Houston transfer Kashie Natt and returner Parsa Fallah are both trying to secure one more year of eligibility, and both have had to work through the courts to do it.
Natt got an ex parte order early this month that allowed him to rejoin team activities. Fallah is reportedly among 45 athletes named in a lawsuit against the NCAA over eligibility. For now, Natt is on the roster and practicing with Oklahoma State as the team prepares for its summer trip to Puerto Rico, but the situation could still play out in court later, with a ruling potentially deciding whether he is eligible or not.
Natt’s path is not a simple one. He has spent time at the junior college level, the NAIA level and then last season made his first appearance at the Division-I level. That background is part of why the eligibility question has become so tangled.
Lutz said Tuesday that coaches are now dealing with a version of the profession that asks for legal fluency as much as basketball sense.
“Now you start with the litigation process, and that’s a whole other animal,” Lutz said Tuesday. “I don’t know the exact number, but I wanna say that the NCAA has spent $350 million last year alone in defending themselves. The system currently has some things that need to be tweaked, and until those are tweaked and until there is some sort of backing by the government, I think we’re going to just continue to see people trying to exercise these loopholes.
“I think that the five-for-five is a good step forward. I think that will eliminate some of this, but because of the timing of they’re rolling it out, in the summer, it’s just gonna be chaotic in between here and October, it really is.”
The NCAA responded to the Natt ruling through Chief Legal Officer Scott Bearby, who called the order flawed and said the association would fight it.
“The order in the Natt case, issued without the NCAA having any opportunity to respond and by a judge not even assigned to hear the case, is demonstrably flawed and the latest instance of an environment where litigation has become a tool to avoid playing by the rules that everyone has agreed to follow. The student-athlete at issue already benefited from the ‘Pavia waiver,’ which provided him the opportunity to play for a fifth season, and nobody, including the institution where he seeks to compete next year, has ever expressed any doubt that his collegiate career ended when the Pavia waiver expired. We will pursue all remedies to seek reversal of this decision, which contributes to the instability in college sports that only Congress can solve.”
Lutz said this is not the kind of thing coaches signed up for. He pointed out that when he was an assistant at SMU in 2006, he was not thinking about roster budgets, contract negotiations or trying to sort out what a returner is worth compared with a freshman or a transfer from a lower level.
“The things that we’ve learned as a college coach in terms of contracts, in terms of negotiations, in terms of revenue sharing and NIL - it’s unbelievable,” Lutz said. “I understand - and we don’t have a general manager here mostly because of budgetary restrictions - but I understand why people have general managers.
Because if you don’t a business sense or you don’t have people to help you, man, you’re gonna have a hard time navigating it by yourself. Luckily our staff, especially (associate head coach) James (Miller), does a great job of helping with all of that.
But I’m very, very hands on.”
In Other News...
Oklahoma States 2026 Outlook Says Plenty About The Future Big 12
A fresh batch of College Football 27 simulations gave Oklahoma State a useful snapshot of where it sits in the 2026 Big 12 race, and the broader picture is one Oregon State fans can appreciate because it speaks to how crowded and volatile the conference has become. Across 100 runs, the Cowboys settled into a middle-ground season, the kind that usually keeps a team in the bowl mix without making it a sure thing, while the game-by-game odds showed how often even the tougher trips can tilt either way.
Oklahoma State also popped up in the playoff conversation a couple of times, which says plenty about the ceiling in the model even if the path never fully opened. The title distribution was spread around the league, with BYU, Texas Tech and Kansas State doing most of the heavy lifting at the top, and Oklahoma State only occasionally breaking through, a reminder that in this version of the future the Big 12 looks less like a one-team chase and more like a weekly knife fight. [Read more 🡒]