Being Hurt by an NCAA Rule Is Not the Same as Proving an Antitrust Violation

Case Analysis | September 15, 2026

College athletes have spent the last two years winning a remarkable number of lawsuits against NCAA eligibility rules.

Picard v. NCAA is useful because Jake Picard did not.

The Rhode Island Superior Court did not hold that NCAA eligibility rules are immune from antitrust law. It did not hold that medical-hardship decisions are beyond judicial review. And it did not conclude that Picard had been treated fairly.

Judge Brian P. Stern instead drew a narrower—and increasingly important—line.

Picard undoubtedly suffered from the NCAA’s decision to deny him another season of football. But harm to an athlete is not automatically harm to competition.

That distinction sounds elementary. In the rapidly changing world of college-sports litigation, it may be one of the most important distinctions courts have left to enforce.

On September 4, 2026, Stern denied Picard’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have allowed him to play for Villanova during the 2026–27 season. The court concluded that Picard had not shown a sufficient likelihood of succeeding on his claim under Rhode Island’s antitrust statute because his evidence did not establish that the NCAA’s denial of his medical-hardship waiver had a substantial anticompetitive effect in a relevant market.

The ruling is temporary, interlocutory and fact-specific. Picard has not lost his entire case.

But the reasoning matters far beyond him.

In the post-Alston era, it is increasingly easy to say that an NCAA rule affects an athlete’s economic opportunities.

Picard asks the harder question:

Then what?

Picard began playing football at Villanova during the 2020–21 academic year.

His first season did not count against his eligibility because of the NCAA’s COVID-era relief. He then received a redshirt for 2021–22. Picard competed during the next four seasons—2022–23 through 2025–26—but his final season ended when he suffered a season-ending knee injury during his fifth competition.

Villanova sought a medical-hardship waiver that would have restored another season of competition.

The NCAA denied the initial request on February 20, 2026. Villanova supplemented the application and sought reconsideration, which was denied again on April 29. The school submitted additional information in June, and on July 1 it received final written confirmation that the waiver remained denied.

Medical-hardship rules generally permit restoration of a season when an incapacitating injury occurs within the required portion of the season and participation stays below specified competition thresholds. NCAA materials use sport-specific calculations tied principally to the first half of the season and 30 percent of the applicable competition maximum.

Picard then went to court.

First, he sued in Pennsylvania, where Villanova is located, asserting breach-of-contract and related theories and seeking emergency relief.

After a full evidentiary hearing, the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas denied his TRO on August 18. According to the Rhode Island decision, the Pennsylvania court concluded that Picard had failed to prove the NCAA’s rejection of his waiver was arbitrary and capricious. Picard attempted to discontinue that case, and the NCAA moved to strike the discontinuance.

Then came Rhode Island.

On August 25, Picard—who is from Rhode Island—filed a new action in Providence County Superior Court. This time, his central emergency-relief theory was antitrust.

He argued that the NCAA and its Division I members collectively restrict the number and duration of seasons athletes may compete; that those restrictions restrain the market for college-athlete labor; and that enforcement of the waiver system against him violated the Rhode Island Antitrust Act.

A hearing followed September 2.

Two days later, Stern denied the TRO.

This was a TRO decision, not a final judgment after discovery and trial.

That matters.

Rhode Island requires a party seeking temporary injunctive relief to show, among other things, a probability of success on the merits, immediate irreparable harm, the absence of an adequate remedy at law, and equities favoring relief. Stern treated likelihood of success as the threshold problem and focused on whether Picard had shown that his antitrust theory was likely to succeed.

Once the court concluded he had not, emergency relief failed.

The opinion therefore does not establish that Picard can never prove an antitrust violation.

It establishes that the evidentiary record he brought into the emergency hearing was insufficient to justify an order overriding the NCAA’s eligibility decision while the case proceeds.

That is a narrower proposition.

It is also a strategically important one.

Emergency eligibility litigation moves fast because the injury is inherently time-sensitive. Every game an athlete misses is a game that cannot later be replayed.

But speed creates a problem for antitrust plaintiffs: antitrust law often demands exactly the kind of economic evidence that is hardest to develop on an emergency schedule.

Picard is a vivid example.

Before reaching antitrust, the NCAA raised two arguments that could have ended the Rhode Island case without addressing the merits.

Neither succeeded.

First, the NCAA challenged personal jurisdiction.

The court agreed Rhode Island lacked general jurisdiction over the NCAA because the organization is not “at home” there. But Stern found enough for specific jurisdiction at this preliminary stage, pointing to the NCAA’s relationships with Rhode Island member institutions and Picard’s alleged injury in Rhode Island.

Second, the NCAA argued that Picard’s earlier Pennsylvania lawsuit triggered first-to-file and claim-splitting principles.

Again, Stern declined to shut the door.

The Rhode Island TRO hearing concerned an antitrust theory that Picard had not presented in Pennsylvania. Picard expressly told Stern that he was not pursuing his breach-of-contract theory as a basis for the Rhode Island TRO.

The court therefore found insufficient overlap to bar the Rhode Island antitrust claim at that stage.

That procedural sequence is worth emphasizing because Picard successfully overcame the NCAA’s threshold defenses.

He got the antitrust question in front of the judge.

Then he lost on the antitrust proof.

Rhode Island’s Antitrust Act is generally construed consistently with comparable federal antitrust law.

That pushed the court directly into the familiar Sherman Act framework.

Picard’s theory was that the NCAA and its members collectively restrain the market in which college athletes provide athletic services to schools.

That premise was not the main problem.

Judge Stern accepted for purposes of the analysis that the NCAA operates within a monopsonistic structure—a market in which powerful buyers collectively purchase athlete labor—and recognized NCAA v. Alston as central to evaluating restraints in that market.

But the existence of collective market power does not end a rule-of-reason case.

It starts one.

Under the rule of reason, the plaintiff initially must prove that the challenged restraint produces a substantial anticompetitive effect in a properly understood market. Only then does the burden shift to the defendant to offer a procompetitive justification. If the defendant does so, the plaintiff may then attempt to show that those benefits can reasonably be achieved through less restrictive alternatives.

Picard never cleared step one.

That is the holding that matters.

There was no real dispute that Picard himself had been hurt.

The NCAA’s decision eliminated his opportunity to play another season at Villanova. In the modern college-sports economy, losing a season can also mean losing NIL opportunities, institutional compensation, exposure, development and a possible pathway toward professional football.

But those are consequences to Picard.

Antitrust law asks about competition.

Stern found that Picard had not supplied evidence showing how denial of this waiver substantially harmed the broader market for college-athlete services.

Picard submitted an affidavit from B. David Ridpath discussing the waiver process and its effect on Picard. But the court found that the affidavit did not establish that this particular eligibility restraint substantially reduced competition across the relevant athlete market.

That distinction drove the result.

The opinion puts it plainly: Picard was “undoubtedly adversely affected,” but the record did not show that denial of his waiver substantially harmed the market of athletes selling their services to NCAA institutions.

That may be the most important sentence in the decision.

Antitrust injury is not simply a synonym for economic injury.

A person can lose money because of a rule without proving that the rule reduces competition.

Picard also argued that the restraint was sufficiently obvious to justify abbreviated antitrust review.

Stern disagreed.

Some restraints are so transparently anticompetitive that courts need relatively little market analysis. Classic horizontal price fixing is the obvious example. The Tenth Circuit’s Law v. NCAA decision, involving NCAA limits on certain assistant-coach salaries, is a familiar college-sports illustration.

But Stern concluded that eligibility restrictions are different.

Removing one athlete from a roster can harm that athlete while opening opportunities for another. Changing eligibility rules can affect roster competition, compensation, scholarships and the supply of available players in multiple directions.

Those effects, Stern reasoned, are not self-evident enough to permit the court simply to assume market-wide anticompetitive harm.

That meant Picard needed evidence.

And, in the court’s view, he did not have enough.

The timing of the opinion is striking because federal appellate courts are increasingly saying two things at once.

First:

NCAA eligibility rules can be subject to antitrust scrutiny.

Second:

Being subject to antitrust scrutiny does not mean the rules violate antitrust law.

The Seventh Circuit made that distinction in Fourqurean v. NCAA.

There, a Wisconsin football player obtained a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule. The Seventh Circuit reversed. Although the rule could be scrutinized under the Sherman Act, the athlete had not produced sufficient evidence of anticompetitive effects merely by showing that the rule excluded him from competing.

Then came Blythe.

On September 9—five days after Picard—the Ninth Circuit issued its published opinion in Blythe v. NCAA. The court joined the Third, Fourth and Seventh Circuits in holding that the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule is a commercial restraint subject to the Sherman Act.

That was significant for athletes.

But the Ninth Circuit nevertheless vacated Noah Blythe’s preliminary injunction because the evidentiary record was too thin. It found problems with both the relevant-market showing and the proof of substantial anticompetitive effects.

In other words, Blythe reinforces Picard’s central point almost perfectly:

Antitrust scrutiny is not antitrust liability.

That distinction can get lost when Alston is summarized as “the Supreme Court said NCAA rules are subject to antitrust law.”

That is true—but incomplete.

Alston eliminated the idea that the NCAA deserves special judicial immunity merely because its restraints operate at the intersection of education and sports. It did not repeal the rule of reason.

Athletes still have to do the work.

That does not mean every eligibility plaintiff will lose.

The Colorado federal court in Wisne v. NCAA granted relief to a group of athletes attacking the NCAA’s transition to its new five-season model. The plaintiffs there challenged a rule operating across an identifiable class of athletes and developed a record directed toward the competitive effects of the NCAA’s structure. The district court found a sufficient likelihood of antitrust success to issue emergency relief.

That contrast suggests an important strategic distinction.

A challenge to an industry-wide eligibility rule may be easier to conceptualize as an antitrust case than a challenge to the individual application of a waiver rule.

The first asks:

What does this restraint do to an entire category of athlete labor?

The second can collapse into:

Why was this particular athlete treated unfairly?

Those are not the same case.

And Picard suggests plaintiffs should be very careful not to plead the first while proving only the second.

Picard’s best response is straightforward.

An eligibility system is not merely a collection of isolated decisions. It determines who may participate in the labor market at all.

If the NCAA and competing schools collectively agree that athletes meeting particular criteria may no longer offer their services, the restraint arguably reduces the supply of eligible labor by design.

An athlete could therefore contend that requiring a separate economic study every time the NCAA excludes someone from the market understates the structure of the restraint.

That argument has force.

The Ninth Circuit’s Blythe decision confirms that eligibility rules affecting an athlete’s ability to participate and profit in the college-sports labor market can be commercial restraints.

But that does not answer the next question: how much does the particular restraint impair competition?

Picard’s evidentiary problem was that his presentation focused heavily on why he should have received the waiver.

That may support a contract, arbitrary-and-capricious or procedural-fairness theory.

It does not necessarily prove a market effect.

Stern was therefore on firm conceptual ground in demanding something more.

The limits of the ruling are as important as the holding.

The court did not decide that NCAA eligibility rules are categorically outside antitrust law.

It did not decide that the NCAA’s medical-hardship system is reasonable.

It did not determine after trial that the NCAA’s restraint has no anticompetitive effects.

It did not hold that Picard received a fair waiver process.

It did not decide Picard’s Rhode Island breach-of-contract theory at the TRO hearing; Picard expressly declined to rely on that claim for the requested emergency relief.

And it did not erase the possibility that a differently developed evidentiary record could produce a different antitrust result.

Most importantly, Picard is a Rhode Island trial-court TRO ruling. It is not binding national precedent on NCAA eligibility litigation.

Its influence will depend more on the persuasiveness of its reasoning than on its precedential force.

That reasoning, however, now has substantial support from the federal appellate decisions in Fourqurean and Blythe.

For athletes challenging eligibility rules, the lesson is not “stop bringing antitrust claims.”

It is build them like antitrust claims.

Emergency papers should not devote nearly all their attention to the unfairness of the athlete’s personal situation and assume Alston does the rest.

Plaintiffs need to identify the relevant labor market carefully.

They need evidence showing how the challenged rule changes output, supply, compensation, mobility or another meaningful dimension of competition within that market.

And where the competitive effect is not obvious, they may need economic testimony tailored to the market, not merely expert criticism of the NCAA’s treatment of the athlete.

That presents a real litigation challenge.

The clock in an eligibility dispute moves faster than the clock in ordinary antitrust litigation.

Football games do not wait for expert reports.

For the NCAA, meanwhile, Picard, Fourqurean and Blythe suggest a defense strategy substantially more durable than insisting that eligibility rules are immune from antitrust scrutiny.

That argument is increasingly difficult to sustain.

A stronger defense may be:

Fine. Apply antitrust law. Now prove the antitrust case.

That forces courts away from generalized dissatisfaction with NCAA governance and back into market definition, competitive effects and evidence.

The distinction may matter enormously as eligibility litigation proliferates.

Picard’s Rhode Island case was not finally resolved by the September 4 decision.

The court denied emergency relief; it did not enter final judgment on the antitrust claim. The Pennsylvania contract litigation also complicated the procedural landscape, with the NCAA contesting Picard’s effort to discontinue that case. Public materials reviewed through September 15 do not show a later ruling altering Stern’s TRO decision.

The immediate practical consequence is harsher.

Without emergency relief, Picard cannot rely on a Rhode Island injunction to play the 2026–27 season while his claims proceed.

And eligibility cases have unusually perishable remedies. By the time ordinary litigation reaches final judgment, the season an athlete wanted to play may already be gone.

That makes Picard a useful reminder that emergency litigation is often the real litigation in college eligibility cases.

Lose the injunction, and winning later may not restore what was lost.

The NCAA’s legal vulnerability after Alston is real.

So is the economic transformation of college sports.

Athletes now operate in a market involving scholarships, NIL compensation, direct institutional payments, professional exposure and increasingly sophisticated contract relationships.

Eligibility rules can unquestionably affect that market.

But Picard shows why the next phase of college-sports antitrust litigation may become more demanding, not less.

Courts are increasingly willing to scrutinize NCAA eligibility restrictions.

They are not necessarily willing to infer an antitrust violation every time an athlete is excluded.

That is the line worth watching.

The athlete can prove he lost an opportunity.

The harder question is whether he can prove competition did too.