The NCAA’s New Eligibility Rule Left One Recruiting Class Behind. A Federal Judge Overruled It — Twice.
- July 31, 2026 the date U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney certified a nationwide class and ordered the NCAA to declare every Division I athlete from the high school class of 2022 eligible for a fifth season — ESPN; Bloomberg Law
- Aug. 10, 2026 when Sweeney denied the NCAA's motion to pause her own injunction, writing that “the NCAA is in a bind of its own making” — On3; Kutak Rock LLP
- 10+ Division I football players already named publicly as eligible to return, including two defensive ends on the reigning national champion — CBS Sports, Aug. 2026
- 0 times a federal or state judge has agreed with the NCAA's position that its eligibility rules are immune from antitrust scrutiny — every court to rule on the question in the last 20 months has rejected it — Fox News; Foley Hoag LLP
- Tenth Circuit where the NCAA has now taken its fight, after losing both the original injunction and its own request to pause it — Bloomberg Law, Aug. 2026
Diego Pavia sued the NCAA in November 2024 over two seasons of junior college football at New Mexico Military Institute that the organization was counting against his Division I eligibility clock. He won a narrow injunction, played out two more seasons at Vanderbilt, and is now headed to the 2026 NFL Draft. Pavia’s case did not rewrite NCAA eligibility rules by itself. But it forced open a door that, twenty months later, an entire recruiting class just walked through.
On July 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney of the District of Colorado certified a nationwide class action — Wisne v. NCAA — and ordered the organization to immediately declare every Division I athlete from the high school class of 2022 eligible for a fifth season of competition in 2026-27. The ruling closed the one gap the NCAA had left open when it rewrote its own eligibility rules two months earlier.
The NCAA asked Sweeney to pause her own order while it appealed. On Aug. 10, she said no. The fight is now in front of the Tenth Circuit, and rosters at Indiana, Florida State, Texas, and a dozen other programs are on hold with it.
Pavia’s argument was narrow: years spent at a two-year junior college pursuing a two-year degree shouldn’t count against the five-year clock the NCAA runs once an athlete enrolls at a four-year school. Chief U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell of the Middle District of Tennessee agreed, enjoining the NCAA on Dec. 18, 2024 from enforcing Bylaw 12.02.6 against Pavia specifically. Rather than litigate every JUCO transfer’s case one at a time, the NCAA granted a blanket waiver to similarly situated players within weeks. It appealed the underlying injunction anyway; the Sixth Circuit dismissed that appeal as moot in October 2025, leaving Campbell’s ruling — and Pavia’s broader antitrust claim — intact.
While that case wound through the Sixth Circuit, the NCAA was rewriting eligibility from scratch. On June 23, 2026, the Division I Cabinet adopted a fully “age-based” model — five seasons within a five-year window starting at enrollment or the year an athlete turns 19 — replacing season-by-season redshirt counting entirely. It applied the new model going forward only. Athletes who enrolled in 2022 and had already used four seasons under the old rule were left out, even though anyone who enrolled a single year later got the full five-year window automatically. Brock Wisne, a former Northern Colorado basketball player, sued over that exclusion. Sweeney agreed, certifying a class covering every sport, not just his own.
The class Sweeney certified is specific: athletes who began Division I competition in the 2022-23 season, exhausted four seasons of eligibility by the end of 2025-26, and haven’t signed a professional contract. The injunction does not reopen the transfer portal — with narrow exceptions litigated separately, returning players generally have to go back to the school they played for in 2025, not shop for a new one.
The biggest football winner so far is Indiana, the reigning national champion. Defensive end Stephen Daley — 19 tackles for loss and 5.5 sacks last season before a knee injury after the Big Ten title game kept him out of the Hoosiers’ championship run — is using the ruling to return. So is Kellan Wyatt, a transfer from Maryland who tallied 8.0 tackles for loss before his own season-ending injury. Both would have simply graduated under the old rule; instead, Indiana gets back two edge rushers it lost to injury rather than eligibility.
Elsewhere, CBS Sports has tracked a growing list: quarterback Thomas Castellanos at Florida State; offensive lineman Cole Hutson at Texas, who had been trying out at Browns and Cowboys rookie minicamps before the ruling gave him a college option again; and Virginia’s Jacob Holmes and Cazeem Moore, TCU’s Austin Jordan, Ohio State kicker Jayden Fielding, Kansas’s Justice Finkley, Arizona State’s Myles Rowser, Houston kicker Ethan Sanchez, and Georgia’s JaCorey Thomas. Most programs are still moving carefully — the NCAA’s pending appeal could strip the eligibility it just handed back.
The NCAA’s case for a stay leaned on chaos. Chief legal officer Scott Bearby called the injunction an order granted with “virtually no evidence, and without witness testimony or even so much as a hearing,” arguing it “invites further chaos in college sports and irreparably harms thousands of student-athletes already on campus.” The NCAA told the court roster spots are “zero sum” — every returning fifth-year player displaces “eligible student-athletes who made life-altering decisions” based on the old rules.
NCAA Chief Legal Officer Scott Bearby sent a letter to membership this morning outlining the governing body's plan to appeal Friday's court decision. Schools and coaches must make their own independent decisions, but an injunction is intended to be short in duration and the NCAA intends to appeal it on an expedited basis.
Sweeney had already cabined the ruling once. In an Aug. 2 clarification order, she confirmed that House v. NCAA’s roster limits and revenue-sharing caps — schools can share up to $20,500,000 a year directly with athletes — remain fully in effect. The injunction grants eligibility. It does not create a roster spot or exempt a returning player from a school’s existing salary cap.
Then came the Aug. 10 ruling on the NCAA’s stay motion — and the line that will follow this case. Sweeney rejected the request outright.
“The NCAA is in a bind of its own making. The NCAA made its own choice, which comes with its own consequences.”
U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney — order denying the NCAA's motion to stay, Aug. 10, 2026
The NCAA immediately took its stay request directly to the Tenth Circuit. Separately, because the injunction doesn’t reopen the transfer portal, Florida State’s Thomas Castellanos — who played only five games at UCF in 2022 before landing at FSU — filed his own suit on Aug. 6 through attorneys Ryan Downton and Darren Heitner, seeking a court order letting him enter the portal without losing the eligibility Sweeney’s ruling just gave him. “The NCAA is fighting tooth and nail to stop my clients from playing this year,” Downton said.
Wisne is the newest entry in a run of NCAA eligibility losses, not an isolated one. Vanderbilt linebacker Langston Patterson, joined by Wisconsin’s Nathanial Vakos, Lance Mason, and Nick Levy and Nebraska’s Kevin Gallic, sued over the redshirt rule directly — the older regulation limiting athletes to four seasons within a five-year clock. Judge Campbell, who had granted Pavia’s injunction, denied their preliminary injunction on Jan. 16, 2026, finding they hadn’t shown likely antitrust success. But he explicitly rejected the NCAA’s broader claim that eligibility rules are exempt from antitrust scrutiny altogether — the sentence that kept the door open for every case that followed.
In Mississippi, Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss won a state-court injunction after a judge found the NCAA acted in bad faith denying him a medical redshirt tied to a 2022 respiratory illness; the NCAA’s appeal to the state supreme court was denied. In Ohio, 24 Division I basketball players won a July 9, 2026 injunction from a Hamilton County judge who called the NCAA’s selective rule application “arbitrary and capricious” and said the organization more closely resembled “a highly profitable professional sports league” wielding “monopsony power” over athletes’ labor than a voluntary academic association.
The NCAA’s public response to the losing streak isn’t a rules fix. It’s a lobbying push. NCAA President Charlie Baker tied Sweeney’s ruling directly to a bill sitting in the Senate: “Today’s rulings and the chaos they bring to college sports are exactly why it’s time to pass this bill,” he said, arguing that without Congress, “college sports cannot set nationwide rules everyone can play by.”
Co-authored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Eric Schmitt (R-MO), the bill would grant the NCAA the antitrust protection on eligibility rules it keeps losing in federal and state court. In the days after Sweeney’s ruling, both the SEC and the Big Ten reversed earlier objections and endorsed it — a shift that improves its odds in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes. It would still need House passage and a presidential signature, and rosters for the 2026-27 season will largely be set before any of that happens.
Key here, from an earlier NCAA eligibility appeal: 'To minimize the burden on all parties, the NCAA simultaneously proposes an expedited briefing schedule designed to resolve this appeal before the college football season begins.'
Strip away the procedural language and the pattern is plain: the NCAA did not get outmaneuvered by one plaintiff’s lawyer. It wrote a new eligibility rule, left one recruiting class out of it without a stated justification a court would accept, and is now asking a Republican-Democrat coalition in Congress to grant it — retroactively — the legal immunity that at least four separate federal and state judges have declined to give it over the past twenty months.
Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney’s July 31, 2026 injunction in Wisne v. NCAA orders the NCAA to let every Division I athlete from the high school class of 2022 return for a fifth season — the class it left out when it adopted a new age-based eligibility model in June. Her Aug. 10 denial of the NCAA’s stay request, writing the organization is “in a bind of its own making,” keeps that door open while the fight moves to the Tenth Circuit. Indiana’s Stephen Daley and Kellan Wyatt, Florida State’s Thomas Castellanos, and Texas’s Cole Hutson are among the named players positioned to benefit — though the NCAA’s pending appeal means none of it is final. It is the latest loss in a string that includes Pavia’s JUCO case, Patterson’s redshirt suit, Chambliss’s Mississippi case, and an Ohio basketball injunction. No judge has yet accepted the NCAA’s claim that its eligibility rules sit outside antitrust law. The NCAA isn’t winning that argument in court — it’s asking Congress to make the argument moot.
The NCAA has stopped asking for a pause. It has now asked the Tenth Circuit to permanently reverse Sweeney’s injunction outright — not pause it while the appeal proceeds, but strike it down for good. “The injunction should never have been granted, and we have asked the Tenth Circuit to permanently reverse it,” NCAA Chief Legal Officer Scott Bearby said. Briefing is now expedited: the class’s response to the NCAA’s motion is due Friday, Aug. 14; the NCAA’s reply is due Monday, Aug. 17. No oral argument has been scheduled. In the meantime, Sweeney’s injunction remains in effect and unpaused — nothing here is resolved.
Two more athletes have surfaced as named plaintiffs in the Wisne class alongside lead plaintiff Brock Wisne: Boston College’s Aidan Shaw and Minnesota’s Cade Tyson, both basketball players. Their addition is a reminder that this fight was never limited to football — the class covers every Division I sport.
The uncertainty reached the conference level this week. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey told member schools in a compliance memo to keep operating under existing NCAA rules, interpretations, and applicable Conference rules “unless and until otherwise advised by the NCAA, the Conference, or a court order” — flagging that SEC intraconference transfer rules stay in force even where NCAA rules are enjoined or unsettled. It’s guidance for athletic departments navigating the chaos, not a new filing. Sankey has separately pushed for a durable fix: “We need to have a defined period of eligibility. This six, seven, eight, and nine-year stuff shouldn’t be happening, whether it’s waiver-driven by the NCAA… or people running to courts.”
Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti is pushing the same argument in Washington: “We’ve asked the Senators to include some sense, like these cases are so new, can we get some protection, can you help us get this system in place?” His push and Sankey’s both tie back to the Protect College Sports Act that Sweeney’s ruling helped revive in the Senate — Congress, not the courts, is where both commissioners now want this settled.
