Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Today, I’m happy to turn the time over to Friend of the Newsletter Luke DeCock, who has a reported story on an important legal battle in college sports. No, not that one. No, not that one either. The other, other one…about an athlete who is stuck in two places at once.
Dink Pate is in two places at once. He’s on Providence’s campus, going to class, practicing with the Friars. He’s also in NCAA limbo, waiting on an eligibility ruling his agent, legal team and school all think should have been a no-brainer, which has stretched out for months.
Pate debuted in the G League when he was 17, playing three years before deciding he wanted to play college basketball after all, at a time when that’s a far more lucrative proposition than when he was first a recruit. The NCAA has cleared other players in his situation, as well as drafted players and European pros. But Pate is now caught up in a controversy that has very little to do with him.
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The backlash against NFL and NBA players returning to college sports started last season. Charles Bediako was briefly eligible for Alabama, three years after he left the Crimson Tide for the G League. A court eventually ruled against him, but his presence on a college roster provoked NCAA president Charlie Baker to post on X drawing a hard line against former pros in college sports. Then, this summer, LSU tried to roster two football players after they’d attended NFL training camps. That move sparked a civil war between the SEC and LSU before the Tigers eventually backed down.
But Pate isn’t returning to college, nor did he sign an NBA contract. He even turned down a two-way offer from the New York Knicks last season in an attempt to follow guidance to remain eligible. Then, in April, Pate signed with Providence; at 20, not only is the new five-year eligibility rule not an issue for him, he would also be one of the youngest players on his college team. He just has terrible timing, stepping into a debate he was trying to avoid. So still he waits.
“A lot of people forget, I’m not going back to college,” Pate said. “I’ve never been to college at all. I didn’t sign that two-way because I was following the rules of the NCAA. I wasn’t drafted. I didn’t play any NBA minutes. They try to put me in a category with these other guys, and I was just following suit. I’m still just following suit. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
As a five-star prospect in Dallas with interest from programs like Alabama and Arkansas, Pate decided to spend 2023-24, which would have been his senior year of high school, with the G League Ignite, a team of NBA prospects who chose to skip college. But Ignite shut down in the spring of 2024, so Pate appealed to enter the NBA draft early. After the NBA denied his request, the G League placed him with a team in Mexico City to honor his contract. He went undrafted in 2025 and played another season in the G League, watching as other players with pro experience were not only able to play college basketball, but also make more money than the G League’s $45,000 annual salary.
Last season, Pate averaged 16.0 points and 6.7 rebounds in 36 games — well enough for the Knicks to offer the 6-foot-8 guard that two-way deal. But since Pate wanted to keep his options open, his representatives sought guidance from the NCAA, which referred them to Baker’s post from December. In it, he said players who signed NBA contracts “including a two-way contract” would not be allowed to play college basketball, even if that’s not the usual NCAA rule-making process.
So when Pate signed with Providence, he believed he’d played by all the rules. But after more than five months, the NCAA still hasn’t processed his eligibility.
The crux of Pate’s issue is the Exhibit 10 contract he signed with the Knicks last fall, a provision in the CBA that allows players to attend training camps and otherwise try out for NBA teams. But Pate’s deal was only for an $85,300 bonus to play for the Knicks’ G League team in Westchester; he was waived immediately. As far as the NBA and NBPA are concerned, he’s never been an NBA player.
Former St. John’s player R.J. Luis, who signed a two-way NBA contract but played in the G League, sued the NCAA to become eligible at LSU before the SEC passed a rule making players returning from pro leagues ineligible. (The Big East does not have such a rule, but even if it did, it would not apply to Pate as an incoming player.) An NCAA filing in the Luis lawsuit referred to an E10 contract Luis had signed as a “G-League contract.” An NCAA spokesperson did not respond to a request for clarification.
“It’s this impossible situation,” said Sam Permut, Pate’s agent with Roc Nation. “He’s trying to do the right thing. He wants to go to college, but there’s no clarity from an eligibility standpoint. Everybody who has fit his criteria has gotten eligible, except for the fact that he signed an E10 contract and provided no services. He has zero years of service. He’s not looked at as a Knicks player. He was not on the training camp roster. He was not on the Knicks roster. He was signed and waived in a matter of minutes. He turned down actual NBA contracts to get clarity from the NCAA, which they did not provide.”
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Among the dozens of players in situations similar to Pate’s whom the NCAA has cleared are drafted players like Baylor’s James Nnaji and Auburn’s Narcisse Ngoy; former G League players like Santa Clara’s Thierry Darlan, Louisville’s London Johnson and BYU and UMass’s Abdullah Ahmed; and more than 90 players who played professionally overseas — many of whom made a lot more money last season than Pate.
“If Dink Pate was to be ruled ineligible, to me that would be criminal,” Providence coach Bryan Hodgson said in July. “Because he made a decision based on something that was said by the leadership. Dink signed an Exhibit 10 contract, which would be about one-tenth of the money as some of the European players who were in college basketball last year. Dink never went to college and left college and is trying to come back to college. He’s done everything the right way.
“We have a letter from the front office of the New York Knicks stating that they offered him those contracts, and he turned those down to maintain his college eligibility. Had he taken those contracts, he might have been the 15th guy on a world championship team. Dink deserves to play college basketball.”
For the moment, Pate’s just doing the student part of “student-athlete,” which is the experience he wanted when he turned down the Knicks’ offer. After playing on Tubi and YouTube in the G League, he’s looking forward to being on NBC and Fox. And he’s excited to be part of a team of his peers, not older pros.
“Right now, the vision I have for Providence, I can see it,” Pate said. “There are a lot of things I want to do with Providence that I wanted to do in the G League, but you don’t have a team, you don’t have a fan base that you’re pushing. If you see me in class, I talk to everybody. They know me around the whole campus block. I’m a different type of dude. I really want some longevity with Providence. I’m not 25 or 26. I just turned 20. Most of my teammates are older than me. I’m the third-youngest dude on the team. A lot of people want to let my experience outweigh my youth. I’m just a kid at the end of the day.”
Without a ruling from the NCAA and still hoping for a positive outcome, Pate isn’t in a position where it makes sense to file a lawsuit. All he can do is wait and hope doing what he was told to do gets him on the court eventually.
