The battle over eligibility in American college basketball has entered a new phase, and this time it directly impacts Europe. The SEC, the most powerful conference in college sports, has unanimously approved a package of rules that bars any player with a professional background. The problem is that the conference's definition of "professional" also catches dozens of European players who have never set foot in the NBA.
What exactly do the rules say
According to the rules ratified this week and reported by ESPN, the following are ineligible to play college basketball in the SEC:
- Any player who has signed a contract with an NBA or G League team.
- Any player who has declared eligible for the NBA Draft without properly withdrawing from the process in the prescribed manner, meaning before the May deadline.
- Any player who has been selected in the Draft to join an NBA or G League roster.
The important detail is that signing is enough; actually playing is not required. And that's where the text becomes slippery, because not all NBA contracts mean the same thing. An Exhibit 10 is essentially a preseason agreement with remote options to make the roster. A two-way contract allows alternating between NBA and G League and can become a standard deal. What about a 10-day contract? What about Summer League? The SEC will need to refine its definition of a professional contract much more, because as currently written it leaves too many gray areas.
The rule with a name
In the college basketball world it's already known as the "RJ Luis Jr. rule." The 2025 Big East Player of the Year signed two two-way contracts after going undrafted that year, despite never playing a single game in the NBA or G League. A Louisiana judge granted him a temporary restraining order that would allow him to play this season with LSU, but under the SEC's new rules he would still be ineligible. His attorney, Tony Clayton, has already announced an expanded lawsuit that includes the conference itself and its commissioner, Greg Sankey.
Sankey, in fact, personally involved himself in the case by submitting an affidavit asking the judge to uphold the rules preventing those with professional experience from returning to college basketball, citing competitive disadvantage and unfairness to other student-athletes. The conference later converted that position into its own policy. The NCAA, for its part, maintains that allowing these returns would turn college basketball into a revolving door with the NBA.
And this is where the Europeans come in
The two cases of interest from this side of the Atlantic are Saliou Niang and Brice Dessert. The first was selected with the 58th pick of the 2025 Draft by the Cleveland Cavaliers; the second went undrafted. Neither signed with an NBA team afterward and both remained in Europe. Yet under the SEC's new rules they appear to be ineligible.
The underlying grievance is procedural. International players automatically enter the Draft upon turning 22 years old, unless they request early entry. It's a different mechanism than for American players or those leaving the college system, and it penalizes someone who neither chose to declare nor had an easy way to "properly withdraw" from the process. They're being punished for a decision they didn't actually make.
The recent precedent went in the opposite direction. The NCAA has previously authorized players with European professional experience: the most well-known case is James Nnaji, with a track record at FC Barcelona and selected in the 2023 Draft, who played last season at Baylor. And the Big 12 has introduced regulations specifically designed to preserve the eligibility of its international players. In other words: each conference is applying its own criteria, which opens the door for the same player to be eligible in one conference and ineligible in another.
What this means for Spanish basketball
Here's the reading that matters. The NCAA route has become in recent years a real alternative for young Spanish and European talent, with recent cases of players who have gone through the college system before making the jump. If the SEC's interpretation becomes established and spreads to other conferences, any European player who has entered the Draft—even automatically, even without signing anything, even without leaving their club—could lose that door.
A mass exclusion doesn't seem likely: there are too many international players over 22 in the system for that to be workable. But the uncertainty is already there, and for a 19 or 20-year-old player who has to decide between signing professionally in Europe or crossing the Atlantic, that uncertainty weighs heavily. FIBA, aware of the mess, has maintained since last year a specific FAQ guide for international players considering the NCAA, and has announced it will continue updating it.
Most likely, as usually happens with this issue, the resolution won't come from a sports decision but from a courtroom.