Amarri Monroe’s eligibility fight has become another example of the NCAA’s new 5-in-5 rule turning college sports into a legal mess, and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips says the whole setup is exactly the kind of disorder schools have been trying to avoid.
The conference’s 18 schools all voted for the rule, yet several of those same schools now find themselves connected to lawsuits brought by athletes who want to keep playing. Monroe’s case is one of them, and it has Syracuse right in the middle of the issue. Monroe, a 6-foot-7 forward and the 2024 Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Player of the Year at Quinnipiac, is challenging the rule in court as he tries to get another season.
Phillips didn’t hide where he stands on the bigger picture.
“Our schools have the right to decide locally what they feel is best in their athletic department at their university,” Phillips said in an interview with Syracuse.com during the ACC’s Tipoff event in Charlotte on Wednesday.
“It goes back to when you can’t govern yourself. You have chaos.
And that’s what’s occurred with eligibility. And so I don’t begrudge any school from deciding what they believe to be in their best interest.”
The schools themselves are not the ones formally taking the NCAA to court, but they clearly have a stake in how these cases turn out. Syracuse, for example, would benefit if Monroe is cleared to play.
During his hearing last month, Syracuse general manager Greg Fahey was seated in the front row. SU football staffers also showed up for wide receiver Justus Ross-Simmons’ hearing.
Phillips said he doesn’t fault the athletes for pushing their cases.
“I think young people should do what they believe is right in their particular case,” Phillips said. “To me, I’m not judge and jury on that.
I want to be supportive of our rules and I want us to be able to enforce our rules. And if somebody believes that the rules have been unfairly applied to them, they have the right to state that case.”
That said, Phillips also pointed back to a case from a year ago, when he signed an affidavit against Virginia quarterback Chandler Morris, who was seeking a seventh year of eligibility.
“I felt that he had, according to NCAA rules, exhausted his eligibility,” Phillips said, “and the judge in Charlottesville ended up siding with the NCAA on that case.”
Monroe’s situation is different. He has already played four college seasons and is trying to fit under the NCAA’s new 5-in-5 rule, which gives athletes five years of eligibility. The rule took effect right away, but players who graduated from high school in 2022 and had already used four years were left out.
Asked whether Monroe had a strong case, Phillips pointed to the flood of eligibility disputes and the fact that no two are exactly alike.
“There’s always a case for why someone should get an additional year, but it’s difficult to be in the gray area on this,” Phillips said. “And so we’ve tried to take a pretty hard line.”
For Phillips, the core issue is simple: the NCAA has to be able to set and enforce its own rules.
“When you cannot govern yourself and police yourself, it causes what we have today,” he said, “which is just total chaos.”
That chaos has already spilled into fall sports, where athletes like Ross-Simmons are able to compete only when a judge blocks the NCAA from enforcing the new rule while the case moves forward. Even then, eligibility can still be taken away later if the athlete loses.
Basketball could end up in the same place. Syracuse opens its regular season Nov. 2, and Monroe could play an unknown number of games before a ruling potentially knocks him off the roster.
“It’s not the way it should be,” Phillips said. “It’s similar to mid-year enrollees.
Those are the things that we’re all trying to clean up. You know, the roster at the beginning of the year should be the roster at the end of the year, but that’s just not what’s happening.”
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