​CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Michael Malone has gone from winning an NBA championship in his head-coaching career to throwing himself fully into a new world of leading a blueblood college basketball program at North Carolina.Yet these days, he’s not much different than any college coaching veteran just trying to get a handle on who’s eligible to play and who isn’t.“What is strange about college athletics is that it seems like the rules change every day,” Malone said Thursday morning. “Like, literally every day. So that is the hardest part.”The NCAA’s move to a five-year, age-based eligibility model has begat a series of eligibility battles in courts across the country, along with last week’s rushed-into-place rules by football-playing power conferences trying to sort out that chaos with the start of the season now at hand. The same questions hover in basketball, too, as to whether players can come back to college after in failed bids to make the pros or after closing what was supposed to be a four-year career in the spring.The sport has the benefit of more time for those cases to make their way through the legal system. Still, preseason practices officially begin later this month, and there’s roughly two months remaining until the season kicks off on Nov. 1. It is unclear how much clarity will come between now and then as to the status of more than 250 men’s and women’s players involved in some type of court action tied to the NCAA’s age-based eligibility model.That includes for Malone’s first UNC team. South Dakota transfer big man Cameron Fens committed last month to UNC when he appeared to be eligible to play a fifth season after one court ruling, only to be ineligible again based on a stay issued in response to an appeal.“You put together the best team you can, you start practicing in the summer and now let’s unleash 80 players into the sport in the first week of August,” UConn men’s coach and two-time NCAA champion Dan Hurley said last month. “You can’t go on like this, no other sport is going like this. … It is total chaos and it is not sustainable.”Changing the eligibility model has led to legal fightsThe change has largely centered around the NCAA’s adoption of a five-year eligibility model that is due to be fully implemented next fall. It will allow players to have five years of eligibility with the clock starting when an athlete turns 19 or graduates from high school, whichever is earliest. But that quickly led to lawsuits from four-year players in the high school class of 2022, who began their careers in the 2022-23 season and completed four seasons of eligibility but are seeking that fifth year.In data as of Thursday morning, the NCAA said there have been 79 lawsuits with a total of 450 plaintiffs across all sports involved in litigation tied to the five-year rule, with 234 of those coming in men’s basketball and 33 in women’s basketball. Of that group, 154 men’s players and 26 women’s players have