Louisiana’s Fifth-Year Injunction Survives the SEC’s First Appellate Challenge

Rapid Response / Legal Alert | September 15, 2026

College sports’ eligibility problem is no longer confined to trial courts.

On September 14, a three-judge panel of Louisiana’s First Circuit Court of Appeal rejected an effort by the Southeastern Conference and Commissioner Greg Sankey to halt the preliminary injunction at the center of the increasingly complicated fight over fifth-year eligibility and athletes returning from professional sports.

The First Circuit denied both the SEC’s request for a stay and its application for supervisory review. Its order was short: “STAY DENIED; WRIT DENIED.” The court concluded that the SEC had not shown that the district court abused its discretion.

That keeps Judge William Jorden’s September 3 preliminary injunction alive.

And that is genuinely new.

The athletes had already persuaded a Baton Rouge trial judge to protect them. Now the SEC has tried—and failed—to convince an appellate court to interrupt that protection.

But there is an important qualification.

The First Circuit did not finally rule that the athletes are entitled to fifth seasons. It did not declare the NCAA’s eligibility system invalid. And it did not issue a sweeping appellate decision establishing that former professional athletes can return to college sports.

It refused to stop the preliminary injunction while the case proceeds.

That is narrower than a full merits affirmance. It is also consequential.

The dispute traces back to the NCAA’s overhaul of Division I eligibility rules in June.

Under the new age-based model, athletes can generally compete during a five-year period that begins with full-time college enrollment or the academic year after their 19th birthday, whichever comes first. But the transition provisions draw a hard line: athletes who used their final season of competition during 2025–26 receive no additional eligibility.

That left members of the 2022 entering class in an unusual position. Many played four consecutive college seasons, exhausted their eligibility in 2025–26 and then watched the NCAA adopt a system permitting five years of competition going forward.

Some sued.

The Louisiana case, Pyburn v. NCAA, became particularly explosive because several plaintiffs had already taken steps into professional football. Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, for example, signed NFL contracts and spent time with professional teams before pursuing another college season. The SEC’s own federal complaint describes the Louisiana lawsuit and acknowledges that Wright and Harris were among the athletes seeking relief.

The SEC responded by reinforcing a separate conference rule against placing certain former professional athletes on football and basketball rosters.

That created two overlapping questions:

Does the NCAA’s new eligibility structure unfairly exclude athletes who finished four seasons just before the rule changed?

And even if a court protects those athletes from NCAA restrictions, can a conference independently say that someone who signed a professional contract has crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed?

Judge Jorden’s September 3 preliminary injunction temporarily answered those questions in favor of the named athletes, preventing the NCAA and SEC from using their rules to defeat the court-ordered protection while the case continues.

The SEC then went to the First Circuit.

It did not get the relief it wanted.

Louisiana law actually explains part of what happened.

Under Article 3612 of the Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure, a party may appeal an order involving a preliminary injunction, but the injunction does not automatically stop operating while the appeal is pending. Suspending it is discretionary.

The SEC needed the appellate court to intervene.

The First Circuit declined.

That means the Louisiana plaintiffs remain protected for now, and the ruling becomes another example of the larger structural problem confronting college sports:

Who actually gets the final word on eligibility?

For decades, the intuitive answer was the NCAA, subject increasingly to conference rules and occasional waivers.

That answer is becoming less reliable.

A national governing body can adopt one rule. A conference can adopt another. Then an athlete can obtain an injunction in state court preventing either rule from being enforced against him.

The immediate result can be something college sports is poorly designed to accommodate: different eligibility rules for similarly situated athletes depending on where—and how successfully—they sue.

That problem exists whether one believes these particular athletes should receive another year or not.

Competitive sports require common rules. “Eligible in Louisiana but not elsewhere” is not much of a national eligibility system.

The SEC’s first appellate setback makes it harder to treat these conflicts as temporary anomalies created by unusually aggressive trial judges. At least in this dispute, an intermediate appellate court has now been asked to stop the injunction and declined to do so.

That does not make the athletes legally right.

It makes their temporary victory more durable.

The irony is that Monday’s ruling does relatively little for the two athletes who turned this dispute into a national story.

LSU ultimately filled its 105-player football roster without Wright and Harris. The Tigers used their remaining spots on Aidan Anding and Gabriel Reliford, leaving no place for either former NFL signee this season.

SEC presidents and chancellors later met without imposing sanctions on LSU, cooling what had briefly become an extraordinary confrontation that included discussion of the school’s conference membership.

So Monday’s appellate order does not put Wright or Harris on LSU’s roster.

It matters because the lawsuit extends beyond them.

The preliminary injunction protects other named athletes pursuing another season, and the underlying legal question remains alive: whether organizations governing college sports can enforce uniform eligibility rules when individual athletes can obtain contrary state-court orders.

That question will outlast LSU’s roster controversy.

It is worth keeping the procedural posture straight.

The First Circuit did not issue a final judgment granting the plaintiffs fifth-year eligibility.

It did not hold that every member of the 2022 class gets another season.

It did not establish a nationwide right for former professional athletes to return to college.

It did not permanently invalidate the SEC’s professional-athlete restrictions.

And it did not resolve the separate federal lawsuit the SEC filed against LSU and university officials in Alabama. That case arose from the conference’s broader claim that it possesses independent authority to establish and enforce membership and competitive rules.

For now, this remains preliminary relief for particular plaintiffs while multiple layers of litigation continue.

But preliminary does not mean meaningless.

A temporary eligibility order can determine an entire season long before anyone reaches a final judgment. In college sports, the calendar often decides the case before the courts do.

The SEC can seek supervisory review from the Louisiana Supreme Court.

The underlying state-court case also continues, meaning the plaintiffs eventually must prove more than that they deserve temporary protection while the lawsuit proceeds.

And the separate federal dispute over conference authority remains another potential path toward a broader ruling.

The larger question is becoming impossible to avoid.

The NCAA adopted its new model partly to make eligibility simpler and more predictable. Yet the transition has helped produce precisely the opposite: competing lawsuits, conference-specific restrictions, emergency injunctions and athletes whose eligibility can turn on what a judge in a particular state does on a particular afternoon.

Monday’s order does not resolve that problem.

It demonstrates why the problem is getting harder to contain.

College sports can write national rules. Increasingly, it cannot guarantee that those rules will mean the same thing everywhere.