Mike DeWine Just Ordered Up a Fifth Season of Eligibility. Charlie Baker Says He Cannot Do That.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed an executive order Tuesday that lets Ohio colleges grant a fifth season of competition to athletes who graduated high school in 2022. The NCAA’s president responded, in writing, that a governor cannot do that.

Both men are doing what you would expect. DeWine is protecting athletes in his state. Charlie Baker is protecting the idea that one organization writes eligibility rules for everybody. Only one of them has a track record of winning this particular fight, and it is not the NCAA.

The order lets Ohio public and private colleges opt in. It does not compel any school to do anything. The detail that matters is who it covers: athletes who graduated high school in 2022, including those who have already played four seasons, a group current NCAA guidance excludes.

“When the rules change, fairness has to remain part of the equation,” DeWine said. He also framed it as catching up to everyone else: “We want Ohio’s student-athletes to have the same opportunity as student-athletes in other states.”

Baker did not hide the irritation

In a letter to member schools, Baker wrote that DeWine “cannot legislate NCAA eligibility rules.” He went further, saying it is “a terrible way to run athletic competitions” when one official sets rules that happen to benefit schools in his own state. Then he pivoted to the ask he has been making for months, urging Congress to pass the Protect College Sports Act.

Baker is right that a patchwork would be unworkable. Eligibility standards that change at the state line break scheduling and postseason qualification in ways nobody has solved on paper, let alone in practice.

But “you cannot do that” and “that will not happen” are different sentences. Baker only gets to say the first one.

California already ran this play

Coverage of the order has drawn the comparison to California’s NIL law, and it holds up. When California moved first, the NCAA’s instinct was to insist a state could not override its rulebook. Other states copied the law in a hurry, and the NCAA eventually wrote the change into its own policy.

The mechanism here is identical. One state creates an advantage, recruits and agents notice, rival states answer, and the national body is left enforcing a rule that nobody with leverage wants to follow.

Which is why the silence from Ohio’s campuses matters more than either quote. The state has eight Division I programs, including No. 4 Ohio State in the Big Ten, Cincinnati in the Big 12 and six MAC members. None of the eight had responded to requests for comment as of publication. The order is optional, so it does nothing at all until a school picks it up.

One Ohio official with actual credibility in a locker room has already endorsed it. Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel, who won national titles at Ohio State and Youngstown State, said it is “important we do not deprive our current student-athletes” of the opportunities their peers have.

Plenty remains unknown. The order’s full text has not been made available for review, no school has said it will opt in, no athlete has been publicly identified as a beneficiary, and no litigation has been filed over it. Today the order is a press release with a signature on it.

Here is the bet anyway. The first Ohio school to use this gets a player back, nothing happens to it, and by next spring other governors have signed something that looks a lot like this. Baker can be completely correct about who writes the rules and still lose the argument.