College Sports Cannot Run on Eligibility by ZIP Code

Strategic Analysis | September 12, 2026

A college athlete’s eligibility should not change when his team bus crosses a state line.

Yet college sports is drifting uncomfortably close to that result.

One athlete gets an injunction. Another loses one. A third wins in state court after a federal injunction disappears. A conference adopts a rule stricter than the NCAA’s. A different judge temporarily prevents that conference from enforcing it. Before an appellate court can sort everything out, the season is halfway over—or finished entirely.

The NCAA still publishes the rulebook. Increasingly, however, courts decide what the rulebook means in practice.

That distinction matters.

The emerging eligibility crisis is often framed as another chapter in the NCAA’s long-running legal troubles: athletes challenge a rule, courts scrutinize the NCAA, and the NCAA eventually changes its policy. But that framing misses the larger problem.

College sports is approaching the limits of litigation as a governance system.

A national competition cannot sustainably determine eligibility through dozens of fact-specific emergency proceedings in federal and state courts. Even if judges eventually converge on the same legal principles, eligibility disputes move on a different clock. Football season does not wait for appellate briefing. Basketball careers do not pause for discovery. Recruiting decisions, scholarships, revenue-sharing allocations and roster spots must be decided before a court of appeals produces a definitive answer.

That is why the next stage of the eligibility fight may not really be about whether athletes receive four years, five years or something else.

It may be about who gets to make that decision with enough legal authority that everyone must live with the answer.

Here is the counterintuitive part: the federal appellate courts are not producing wildly inconsistent antitrust doctrine.

They are beginning to converge.

After NCAA v. Alston, athletes increasingly challenged the NCAA’s traditional Five-Year Rule and related restrictions under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Several trial courts granted preliminary injunctions. But the Third, Fourth and Seventh Circuits subsequently vacated injunctions in cases including Elad v. NCAA, Robinson v. NCAA and Fourqurean v. NCAA, largely because the athletes had not developed enough economic evidence to define the relevant market or establish the restraint’s anticompetitive effects.

Then, on September 9, 2026, the Ninth Circuit added Blythe v. NCAA.

Its ruling is particularly important because the NCAA won the injunction battle while losing a much larger doctrinal argument.

The Ninth Circuit held that the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule is a commercial restraint subject to the Sherman Act. Eligibility rules do not escape antitrust scrutiny merely because they are labeled eligibility rules. But the court still vacated the injunction because the athlete had presented almost no evidence establishing the relevant market or substantial anticompetitive effects.

That pattern increasingly describes the law.

The question is no longer simply whether an eligibility rule is “commercial.” In the modern college-sports economy—where playing another season may mean revenue-sharing payments, NIL income, professional exposure and substantial economic opportunity—courts are increasingly unwilling to place eligibility rules outside antitrust law altogether.

But being subject to antitrust law does not mean being illegal.

That is the distinction some of the public discussion misses.

The appellate courts have generally demanded the ordinary, fact-intensive rule-of-reason analysis used in antitrust cases. An athlete cannot simply say, “This rule prevents me from playing and earning money, therefore it restrains trade.” The athlete ordinarily needs evidence about the actual labor market, the NCAA’s power within it, the competitive effects of the restriction and the NCAA’s asserted justifications. The Fourth Circuit emphasized precisely that point in Robinson.

So the emerging appellate message is something like this:

The NCAA may regulate eligibility. But “because we are the NCAA” is no longer the legal justification for doing so.

That sounds like convergence.

Administratively, it creates something closer to chaos.

Eligibility cases have an unusual feature: temporary relief can become final relief in everything but name.

Suppose a football player seeks one additional season.

If he loses his request for a preliminary injunction in August, the season may be effectively gone before the merits of his lawsuit can be adjudicated.

If he wins the injunction and plays the season, an appellate victory for the NCAA months later cannot put those games back in the box.

That procedural reality changes litigation strategy.

It encourages athletes to file quickly. It encourages requests for temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions. It makes forum selection enormously important. And it places extraordinary weight on decisions made from expedited evidentiary records.

Diego Pavia’s litigation illustrates the problem. A Tennessee federal court initially enjoined application of the NCAA’s junior-college eligibility rule to him. The NCAA then issued a broader waiver that allowed similarly situated players to compete. When the case reached the Sixth Circuit, the court dismissed the NCAA’s preliminary-injunction appeal as moot because the waiver already gave Pavia the relief he had sought for the season.

The underlying legal question did not become unimportant.

The season simply outran the lawsuit.

The Ninth Circuit confronted another version of that problem this week in Braham v. NCAA. Two players had obtained preliminary injunctions allowing them to participate in the 2025 football season. By the time the appeals were decided, the injunctions had expired and their collegiate careers were finished. The court dismissed the NCAA’s appeals as moot.

That is not a minor procedural curiosity.

It explains why eligibility law can remain unsettled even after substantial litigation. The dispute has a built-in expiration date.

And the problem becomes more pronounced when athletes move between forums.

This summer, a Colorado federal court granted classwide preliminary relief to athletes challenging the NCAA’s implementation of its new eligibility model. The Tenth Circuit stayed that injunction on August 21 after concluding that the NCAA had made a strong showing that it was likely to succeed on appeal.

Days later, litigation continued elsewhere.

An Arizona state court recently granted temporary relief allowing athletes including Ismail Mahdi and Max Harris to pursue another season, at least pending further proceedings.

In Texas, meanwhile, a state appellate court reversed an injunction that had permitted basketball player Freddy Hicks to compete. The court agreed that NCAA eligibility rules were commercial enough to receive antitrust scrutiny under Texas law, but held that Hicks had not produced sufficient evidence defining the relevant market and establishing competitive harm.

The opinions are not necessarily inconsistent.

The outcomes still are.

And for an athlete deciding whether he can suit up Saturday, that is the difference that counts.

To its credit, the NCAA has recognized that its traditional eligibility framework had become difficult to defend and even harder to administer.

In June, Division I adopted a sweeping age-based eligibility system. Instead of the traditional combination of seasons-of-competition limits, redshirts and numerous extensions, the new model generally creates a five-year eligibility period beginning at initial full-time college enrollment or the academic year after an athlete turns 19, whichever occurs first. Current athletes with eligibility remaining receive transitional treatment under whichever framework is more favorable; athletes whose eligibility had already been exhausted by the end of 2025-26 generally do not receive another year.

There is a sensible theory behind the change.

Fewer discretionary waivers mean fewer edge cases. A clock tied principally to age and enrollment is easier to understand. Schools gain greater roster predictability. Athletes have a clearer idea of how long they can compete.

But simplification solves only one half of the problem.

The NCAA can rewrite its bylaws.

It cannot rewrite the Sherman Act.

And the transitional line the NCAA drew immediately created a new category of plaintiffs: athletes who had exhausted eligibility just before the more generous system arrived and argued that excluding them from the transition was itself unlawful.

That is the deeper problem with trying to litigate your way toward a stable national system.

Every reform creates a boundary.

Every boundary creates winners and losers.

And when eligibility now carries substantial economic value, the loser has an incentive to sue.

The governance problem becomes even more complicated when conferences adopt their own eligibility restrictions.

The current LSU dispute is almost a laboratory experiment.

A Louisiana state judge recently issued preliminary relief potentially allowing former professional players to return to college competition. The SEC, which had adopted its own rule restricting the return of former professional athletes, responded through separate federal litigation against LSU. The dispute escalated to the point that the conference scheduled consideration of LSU’s membership before LSU ultimately omitted the former pros from its final roster.

None of those proceedings represents a final judicial determination of the underlying legal issues.

That is precisely the point.

An athlete may now confront several overlapping sources of authority:

the NCAA rulebook, a conference rulebook, institutional decisions, federal antitrust law, state antitrust or contract law, and whatever emergency judicial orders happen to be in effect.

That is not really one eligibility system.

It is layered sovereignty.

And sophisticated conferences will increasingly matter because the NCAA’s inability to enforce certain rules nationally does not necessarily prevent conferences from attempting to impose their own competitive standards.

That may make sense in some circumstances. Conferences have legitimate interests in competitive integrity and membership standards.

But decentralization has a cost.

A sport in which the same athlete can be eligible for NCAA competition but prohibited under his conference’s rules—or temporarily eligible because one court has enjoined one governing body but not another—begins to resemble a federation without a supremacy clause.

It is easy to characterize these cases as disputes between an athlete who wants another year and an organization trying to stop him.

Athletic departments cannot think about them that narrowly.

Eligibility is now part of roster economics.

A fifth-year player may occupy a roster position another athlete expected to receive. He may command a meaningful portion of a school’s revenue-sharing budget. His availability affects recruiting, transfer-portal decisions and NIL negotiations. Coaches construct depth charts months before opening day. Scholarship commitments and roster-limit decisions are interconnected.

One court order can therefore redistribute opportunities well beyond the plaintiff.

That does not mean the plaintiff should lose. Rights do not disappear because enforcing them creates administrative inconvenience.

It means the relevant cost is systemic.

Consider what an athletic department must do when a highly valuable player’s eligibility depends on pending litigation.

Do you reserve a roster spot?

Do you allocate revenue-sharing money?

Do you recruit a replacement?

Do you structure the player’s agreement contingent on eligibility?

What happens if the player participates under an injunction that is later vacated?

Historically, the NCAA’s Rule of Restitution has allowed consequences when an athlete competes under a court order that is later reversed, which is why athletes frequently seek to enjoin that rule alongside the underlying eligibility restriction.

The litigation therefore does not merely determine whether one athlete plays.

It changes how an entire department manages risk.

You cannot build a roster around a preliminary injunction.

At least not comfortably.

There is an obvious response to all of this:

Why should Congress intervene merely because the NCAA keeps losing some lawsuits?

Courts exist precisely to prevent private organizations from imposing unlawful rules. Antitrust law is supposed to subject agreements among competitors to scrutiny. And the recent appellate decisions actually suggest that the judicial system is creating a coherent framework.

That argument deserves more than a footnote.

Centralization can become insulation.

If Congress simply gives the NCAA or conferences broad immunity from antitrust law, college sports might achieve certainty by sacrificing accountability. A uniform bad rule is not better merely because it is uniformly bad.

There is also value in litigation. Pavia’s challenge helped expose the arbitrary economic consequences of counting junior-college competition differently in an era when Division I participation can be worth substantial money. Other lawsuits have forced courts and administrators to confront rules built for an economic model that no longer exists.

The answer therefore should not be:

Give the NCAA its power back.

That would misunderstand what has changed.

The stronger case is for national rules accompanied by national rights and defined limits on governance authority.

That is different.

The pending Protect College Sports Act makes the issue unusually concrete.

The current Senate proposal would establish federal baseline eligibility rules, including a five-year framework; preempt conflicting state and local laws governing eligibility and transfers; and provide targeted antitrust protection to schools, conferences and athletic associations when enforcing specified rules. It would also require athlete representation on certain governing bodies and create private enforcement rights for specified athlete protections.

As of September 12, the legislation is not law. The Senate Commerce Committee advanced it 19-9 in June, Senate leadership later initiated the process for floor consideration, and lawmakers are preparing for further action when the Senate returns.

Reasonable people can disagree sharply about the bill’s particulars, especially its antitrust protections, compensation restrictions and consequences for athlete bargaining power.

But its architecture reveals something important about where the debate has moved.

Congress is no longer discussing only NIL.

It is discussing governance.

Section 113 would establish eligibility rules.

Section 118 would protect certain enforcement decisions from antitrust liability.

Section 121 would preempt conflicting state and local eligibility rules.

Those provisions are connected.

A national rule is only truly national if somebody has the lawful authority to enforce it nationwide.

That may be the most consequential issue buried inside the college-sports legislation now before Congress.

Even if Congress provides national authority, the hard questions do not disappear.

They simply move.

A durable system would still need answers about transition rules, professional participation, international athletes, junior colleges, medical absences, military service, pregnancy, religious missions and extraordinary hardship.

More important, it would need a credible process for deciding borderline cases.

That process should matter just as much as the substantive eligibility rule.

Centralized authority without procedural safeguards invites arbitrary government by rulebook. A sustainable system would likely need transparent standards, athlete participation in rulemaking, prompt review, reasoned decisions and a mechanism capable of resolving disputes before the season renders them meaningless.

The trick is not merely creating one rulebook.

It is creating one rulebook that athletes, schools and courts regard as legitimate.

In the short term, expect more litigation.

The NCAA’s new eligibility model created transition lines that will continue generating disputes. Athletes whose careers sit just outside those lines have enormous incentives to seek emergency relief, particularly when another season may carry significant revenue-sharing, NIL or professional-development value.

Expect litigation strategy to become more sophisticated too.

After Elad, Fourqurean, Robinson and now Blythe, plaintiffs challenging eligibility rules know that anecdotes about lost playing time or NIL money may not be enough. Successful antitrust challenges will increasingly require actual economic evidence defining the relevant labor market and explaining how a particular restriction harms competition.

That raises the price of these cases.

It may also push future challenges toward coordinated or class litigation rather than isolated individual suits.

If federal legislation passes, the battlefield changes dramatically. Litigation would not disappear. Lawyers would argue about the meaning and scope of the federal statute, whether governing bodies remained within any statutory safe harbor, whether particular restrictions were preempted and whether protected procedures were followed.

But at least everyone would be arguing from the same national source of law.

If Congress does nothing, the NCAA and conferences will keep trying to build stability contractually and legislatively within their own structures.

Courts will keep reviewing those efforts.

Eventually, appellate precedent may produce considerable uniformity.

The problem is the word eventually.

College sports needs to know who is eligible before kickoff.

The central eligibility problem in college sports is no longer simply that the NCAA’s rules are too restrictive, too complicated or too old.

It is that no existing institution possesses unquestioned authority to make a national eligibility rule stick.

Courts are increasingly agreeing that eligibility restrictions operate inside a commercial marketplace and therefore remain subject to antitrust scrutiny. At the same time, preliminary injunctions, state-law claims, conference rules and the unforgiving calendar of a sports season can produce radically different practical outcomes before appellate courts ever reach the merits.

That is not fifty formal rulebooks.

It may be worse.

It is one nominal rulebook filtered through fifty jurisdictions.

There are legitimate reasons to worry about giving any governing body too much authority. Federal legislation should not become a euphemism for immunity from accountability.

But college sports ultimately requires both rights and rules.

And a national competition cannot be governed indefinitely by a stack of temporary restraining orders.