Former Mizzou hoops player Shawn Phillips part of lawsuit over new NCAA eligibility rules

On Tuesday, the NCAA opted to move forward with a “five-in-five” age-based standard for eligibility that would give current and future college athletes five years to play five seasons of their sport.

That means a player going into their fourth season will have the opportunity to play a fifth under the new rules, but a player who just wrapped up their fourth season — like Phillips — cannot.

Phillips, who hails from Dayton, Ohio, began his career in the 2022-23 season with LSU. He then spent two years at Arizona State before transferring to Mizzou ahead of the 2025-26 campaign.

Phillips started 31 games for the Tigers, playing 20.5 minutes per game. He averaged 7.6 points, 5.1 rebounds and 1.5 blocks per contest.

If the lawsuit is successful and Phillips receives the injunctions he and his fellow plaintiffs are seeking, it’s not clear where he would play. MU’s roster is full, so there would not be a spot available for him to return.

On Tuesday, the NCAA's Division I cabinet unanimously approved the significant change to eligibility rules that ditches waivers, redshirts and sport-specific rules to grant all athletes up to five years of eligibility if they enroll at a college no later than the academic year after their 19th birthday.

"With these changes, the Cabinet has taken decisive action for the benefit of student-athletes and the system of NCAA Division I athletics," Illinois athletics director and DI cabinet chair Josh Whitman said in a statement. "For many student-athletes who enroll in college immediately after high school, these changes will result in the opportunity to potentially compete for an additional season in their chosen sport. For campus officials and coaches, this change provides rules that are simpler to administer and easier to predict for roster management decisions."

The simplicity point is key: No longer will coaches, players and compliance officers have to parse through rules for how much an athlete can participate and still preserve a year of eligibility through redshirts. There won't be a need to retroactively file for waivers after season-ending injuries.

And in that sense, college sports could benefit given the bevy of eligibility-based lawsuits and rule changes that have appeared in the years following the pandemic and arrival of NIL.

The athletes suing, though, are part of a recruiting class that did not benefit from the extra year given to athletes who played during the COVID-19 pandemic. That same group is now going to narrowly miss out on the fifth season granted to current and future athletes under the new eligibility rules.

The lawsuit argues that "the NCAA's application of this bylaw ... unfairly limits the number of games they can participate in during their 'five-year eligibility window' and unjustifiably restrains their ability to earn money through use of their name, image and likeness."

Interestingly, the portion of the petition that introduces Phillips as a plaintiff mentions two other former Mizzou basketball players — Jacob Crews and Jayden Stone — by name. They both played six seasons of college basketball through time at the junior college level in the case of Crews and an injury waiver in the case of Stone.

That inclusion seems to suggest that Phillips, too, should be allowed to play as long as they did.

No court date has been set, so it's not clear when an injunction could arrive for Phillips and the other athletes in the lawsuit. It's additionally unclear whether there will be any other similar cases filed by athletes in other sports but the same class that just missed the five-in-five cutoff.