The NCAA granted former USC linebacker Solomon Tuliaupupu a ninth year of college football eligibility — and the public mockery that followed proves the system treats players as disposable labor while universities pocket billions.

Tuliaupupu missed five full seasons to injuries and illness. He finally stayed healthy enough to contribute at Montana, and the public response was to roast him. The real scandal isn't a ninth year — it's a multibillion-dollar enterprise that extracts years from young men, discards them when they break down, and then generates outrage when one of them gets a fair shot at finishing what he started.

According to Essentially Sports, the NCAA ruled Tuliaupupu eligible for a ninth year on February 14, citing the five seasons he lost to injury and illness. He becomes just the second player in college football history to reach nine years, joining former Oregon and Miami tight end Cam McCormick, who played from 2016 to 2024 and now works as a scouting assistant for the New England Patriots.

The injury trail is staggering. A foot injury wiped out his 2018 and 2019 seasons at USC. A knee injury took 2020. He missed 2021 after sitting out spring practice. He finally broke through in 2022 with 10 tackles and 2.5 sacks across 14 games — only for another training camp injury to erase his entire 2023 season.

"I don't know if this is for me," Tuliaupupu recalled, per Essentially Sports. "There's nights I just stay up and cry, and I go lift some weights to feel better. Then I'd want to feel sad again and start crying again."

He returned in 2024, appeared in nine games, and then illness disrupted that season too. By then he was weighing retirement and looking for work outside football. Instead, the NCAA confirmed one more year. He transferred to Montana and delivered: 43 tackles, two sacks, two forced fumbles, second-team All-Big Sky honors, and the program's Doug Betters Golden Helmet Award for hardest hitter and best tackler. He missed one game all season and helped Montana reach the FCS semifinals.

The online response? Ridicule.

"Everyone in the whole freaking country is like roasting my a--… It's funny, but at the same time, it's like, alright, cool. I got some ammo," Tuliaupupu told USA Today, as reported by Essentially Sports. "Sometimes it's kind of like it's fuel for me to do good this next year and be like, alright, you guys want to talk on that smack? Alright, I'm gonna show you then."

Essentially Sports framed the ninth year as potentially "funny to many" given how hard players struggle to get even a fifth year. That framing buries the operative fact: Tuliaupupu didn't get a gift. He got credit for five stolen seasons. The NCAA doesn't hand out extra years out of generosity — it grants them only when the damage is documented enough to meet their paperwork threshold.

The NCAA's amateurism model classifies players as "student-athletes" to avoid paying them while university athletic departments rake in over a billion dollars annually in football revenue alone. A ninth year of eligibility isn't a loophole — it's a symptom of a system that extracts maximum labor for minimum return and makes players beg for every season they've already earned through blood and rehab.

The question isn't why Solomon Tuliaupupu gets a ninth year. The question is why a system this profitable makes a 26-year-old man cry himself to sleep before it deigns to give him back what it took.