The NCAA Just Won Its Fifth-Year Eligibility Case in Federal Court. The Fight Is Down to 200 State Lawsuits.
The NCAA spent most of 2026 losing eligibility cases. On Friday it won the biggest one.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reversed and vacated in full the nationwide preliminary injunction in Wisne v. NCAA, the order that had let athletes who enrolled out of high school in 2022 play a fifth season. Eddie Pells of the Associated Press reported the decision Friday afternoon.
The ruling turned on antitrust basics, not fairness
Circuit Judge Carolyn McHugh, writing for a three-judge panel, held that the plaintiffs never defined a relevant market. That is the threshold requirement in an antitrust case, and without it nothing else gets reached. The panel rejected the theory that every Division I athlete in every sport belongs to one market, with McHugh noting that “a football player looking for a Division I roster spot” would not treat the 101 Division I schools without football programs as reasonable substitutes.
Judge Paul Kelly had signaled the problem at the Oct. 13 argument. “It doesn’t seem there’s been a definition of the market from a huge, huge division,” he said, “golf, everything.” He added that the plaintiffs were “lumping them all together” without examining “commonality and interchangeability of the various buyers.”
Two things the coverage did not establish: whether the panel was unanimous, and where the plaintiffs go from here. No report has named the third judge or a next filing.
How the injunction got there
U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney of the District of Colorado certified a nationwide class and granted the injunction on July 31. The class covered athletes who began competing in 2022-23 and had used up four years of eligibility by the end of 2025-26. The Tenth Circuit stayed the order on Aug. 21 and heard argument in October.
The lead plaintiff is Brock Wisne, a former Northern Colorado men’s basketball player. There are 11 named plaintiffs, drawn from basketball, baseball and track. None of them is a football player.
The rule they attacked is the age-based model the Division I Cabinet adopted on June 23, which gives athletes five years to play five seasons going forward while leaving the 2022 class outside it.
Football players are still eligible, for now
This is where the win stops. The Tenth Circuit vacated one federal injunction. The AP reports that roughly 200 state-court cases involving as many as 850 athletes are untouched by it.
Texas Tech quarterback Thomas Castellanos is the clearest illustration. His eligibility comes from a Jefferson Circuit Court order in Louisville issued Oct. 16 covering 38 athletes, and Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Sara Walter Combs declined on Oct. 30 to grant the NCAA emergency relief against it. Combs wrote that “it behooves no one for Respondents’ eligibility status to flip-flop repeatedly.” That is a state matter, and Friday’s federal ruling does not directly disturb it. No report has said whether Castellanos is available for Texas Tech, which came into the weekend 7-1 and ranked 15th in the first College Football Playoff rankings.
The NCAA is treating this as a mandate
Scott Bearby, the NCAA’s chief legal officer, told the AP the decision was “consistent with the approach taken by every federal court of appeals.” In a memo to member schools he was sharper, writing that “injunctions like the one entered by the district court have created chaos for the 2026-27 season” and that “the NCAA membership’s decision about the implementation of the age-based eligibility rule was clear and unanimous.”
Then the line aimed at his own members: “It is disappointing that a minority of schools continue to support efforts to flout rules they agreed to follow.”
That is the real story of Friday. The NCAA got its rule back on paper and lost nothing in the state courts where rosters are actually being decided. The obstacle now is member schools helping their own players sue, and the NCAA just said so out loud.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
