A Power Conference wide receiver with two junior-college seasons on his NCAA ledger, a season-ending knee injury in fall camp that should have qualified as a medical hardship the year it happened, and a single shot at one more season after the league's one-year blanket waiver expires. We mapped the three levers and built the plan to run them in parallel.
Devin's NCAA ledger reads two junior-college seasons, two Power Conference seasons at the program he transferred to as a sophomore, and a final season at his second Power Conference school. Five seasons in five years. Junior-college seasons count under NCAA Bylaw 12.8.
The blanket waiver that opened the door to his fifth season was a one-time accommodation tied to a federal injunction, and it expires at the end of the 2025 to 2026 academic year. Under the rule as written, he is out for 2026.
The season we have to fight over is his second year at his first Power Conference program. He played three games of a twelve-game schedule. An MCL injury sustained in fall camp, MRI-confirmed inside ten days, re-aggravated within weeks, and confirmed as a Grade II tear by season-ending MRI shut his year down. The contemporaneous medical record is clean. The hardship waiver standard under NCAA Bylaw 12.8.4 caps eligible game count at the greater of three games or thirty percent of the team's scheduled games. On a twelve-game schedule, that cap is four. He sits at three. He fits the rule.
The hardship waiver was never filed.
We laid out three levers. Any one of them can deliver another season. The strongest combination runs two in parallel.
The medical hardship waiver is the highest-probability path per dollar spent. It is a school-driven administrative process. We are coordinating with the program of record from the injury year on the institutional filing, building the medical-documentation package, drafting the cover narrative, and structuring the records release between his current program and his prior program.
The federal antitrust track is the second lever. There is an active federal class action challenging the junior-college counting rule under the Sherman Act, and the athlete's name appears in the amended complaint. The first move on any individual filing is confirming whether he is a represented named plaintiff in that case, whether a separate filing is duplicative or complementary, and whether his current and prior institutions will support an individual antitrust posture. We are running that diligence first.
The California state law track is the third lever. His current program is a California public institution. California has an existing statutory framework that gives state courts a route to scrutinize associational restraints on collegiate athletes. The state filing is cleanest when paired with the medical hardship rather than run in isolation.
The plan: medical hardship first, federal antitrust diligence in parallel, California state filing held in reserve.
"The rule was written for him the year he got hurt. The school just never filed."
— Outside Counsel Review
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