One Eligibility Rule, Different Courts, Different Answers

Rapid Response / Legal Alert | September 10, 2026

The NCAA wanted a simpler eligibility system.

It is getting almost everything but.

On September 9, the Georgia Court of Appeals granted the NCAA’s request to stay an August 5 injunction entered in Godfrey v. NCAA, a Cobb County case challenging the NCAA’s transition to its new age-based eligibility framework. The stay pauses the protections previously obtained by the player-plaintiffs while the appeal proceeds.

Among the athletes affected are Arizona forward RJ Godfrey, Gonzaga forward Chauncey Wiggins, Texas Tech’s JaMichael Stillwell, and other veteran basketball players who had expected to pursue another college season under the trial court’s order. Wiggins, for example, is now unable to practice or compete with Gonzaga unless the stay is lifted or he obtains eligibility through another route.

Godfrey’s attorneys are reportedly preparing an emergency request for reconsideration.

So the litigation is far from over.

The more important point is that Georgia has now joined a growing list of appellate courts willing to pause trial-court eligibility injunctions while the NCAA challenges them.

And that changes the picture considerably.

The phrase is convenient, but slightly misleading.

In June, Division I adopted a new age-based eligibility framework that replaces many of the old rules concerning redshirts, seasons of competition, and eligibility extensions with a continuous five-year period of eligibility generally triggered by full-time college enrollment or age. The NCAA itself cautions that calling the system “five-for-five” is not entirely accurate because the rule does not guarantee every athlete five seasons of competition.

The transition provision created the current litigation.

Athletes who still had eligibility remaining after the 2025–26 academic year may receive whichever system—the old rules or the new age-based model—is more favorable. But athletes who used their final season under the old rules during 2025–26 receive no additional eligibility.

That leaves many members of the high-school Class of 2022 in an uncomfortable position.

They entered college under a system that generally allowed four seasons of competition within a five-year window. The NCAA then adopted a framework under which younger athletes may be able to compete during all five years—but declined to extend the new benefit backward to athletes whose fourth season had just ended.

Those athletes have responded with lawsuits around the country.

The Georgia case was one of the players’ more significant victories.

On August 5, Cobb County Superior Court Judge Henry Thompson entered an interlocutory injunction in Godfrey. The court concluded that the plaintiffs had shown sufficient likelihood of success on state-law theories, including breach-of-contract and Georgia Fair Business Practices Act claims, based in part on allegations that the NCAA was applying its eligibility framework arbitrarily.

The injunction did more than simply say the players could compete.

It also protected against several collateral consequences that can otherwise make an eligibility injunction practically worthless—including aspects of the NCAA’s Rule of Restitution and restrictions affecting players who had acted in reliance on their supposed ineligibility.

That mattered immediately.

Players made roster and transfer decisions based on the relief. Programs planned around them. Some athletes had already taken steps toward professional basketball before the courts reopened the possibility of another college season.

Then the NCAA appealed.

Now the Court of Appeals has pressed pause.

This is the most important legal distinction in the story.

The Georgia Court of Appeals did not reverse Judge Thompson’s injunction on the merits. It stayed the injunction while the appeal proceeds.

Those are not the same thing.

The stay order reportedly provides virtually no substantive explanation for the court’s decision. It therefore would be a mistake to read it as a holding that the players’ contract claims fail, that the NCAA’s transition rule is lawful, or even that Judge Thompson ultimately abused his discretion in granting relief.

But preliminary-relief litigation has a peculiar significance in sports.

Ordinarily, lawyers can comfortably distinguish between temporary relief and a final judgment.

Athletic calendars are less patient.

If an appellate court resolves the merits six months from now, a basketball player who lost the 2026–27 season cannot go back to November and play it again.

Procedurally temporary can be practically permanent.

That is why these stay battles matter almost as much as the eventual appeals.

Georgia also is not an isolated result.

The Ohio Court of Appeals previously stayed an injunction benefiting athletes challenging the same transition policy. The Tennessee Court of Appeals did the same, emphasizing in its order the NCAA’s likelihood of success on the legal issues presented. And on August 21, the Tenth Circuit stayed the nationwide injunction in Wisne v. NCAA while that federal antitrust appeal proceeds.

The NCAA can therefore make a legitimate point that appellate courts have been more receptive to its position than the first wave of trial-court rulings suggested.

But that does not mean the NCAA has won the underlying legal debate.

Consider what happened in the Ninth Circuit this week. In Blythe v. NCAA, the court rejected the broader proposition that NCAA eligibility restrictions somehow sit outside antitrust law simply because they concern eligibility rather than compensation. The court treated the challenged eligibility restriction as subject to Sherman Act scrutiny—but nevertheless ruled against the athlete because his evidence was insufficient to establish the relevant market and anticompetitive effects necessary for preliminary relief.

That distinction is important.

The emerging appellate message is not necessarily that NCAA eligibility rules are untouchable. It is that challenging them is harder than winning an emergency injunction might make it appear.

That is a considerably more nuanced—and important—development.

Preliminary-injunction litigation is fundamentally about uncertainty.

Nobody yet knows which side will ultimately win.

So courts must decide who lives with the consequences while they find out.

For the athletes, the argument is obvious. Their remaining competitive careers are finite. Losing the season may mean losing playing opportunities, NIL compensation, institutional revenue sharing, professional exposure, and a year of development that cannot later be reconstructed through money damages.

For the NCAA, the harm runs in the opposite direction. Once an athlete plays a season that the governing rules did not permit, the competition has occurred. Roster opportunities have been consumed. Opponents have competed against the athlete. Scholarships and compensation may have been allocated. A later appellate victory cannot unplay those games either.

That makes the concept of preserving the “status quo” surprisingly slippery.

To the NCAA, the status quo is enforcement of the eligibility rules adopted by its membership.

To an athlete who already obtained an injunction, transferred schools, enrolled, signed NIL arrangements, and joined a roster in reliance on that order, the status quo may look very different.

Both sides can plausibly argue that time creates irreversible harm.

That is exactly why appellate courts are becoming so important.

The larger problem is national uniformity.

On the same day Georgia appellate relief placed Godfrey and other basketball players back in eligibility limbo, an Arizona state judge granted temporary relief allowing football players Ismail Mahdi and Max Harris to compete after federal appellate proceedings had disrupted the protection they previously enjoyed.

Think about what that means operationally.

Two athletes can have substantially similar eligibility histories.

One may play because a state judge granted emergency relief.

Another may sit because an appellate court stayed nearly identical relief.

A third may be protected by an injunction arising under contract law.

A fourth may be litigating under the Sherman Act.

And every school still has to certify eligibility, manage its roster, allocate compensation, and prepare for competition in real time.

The NCAA still has a national rulebook. It increasingly does not have a national answer.

That is the deeper significance of the Georgia stay.

There is another reason the litigation is so difficult to unify: not every case rests on the same legal theory.

Wisne is principally an antitrust case.

Godfrey relies heavily on Georgia contract and consumer-protection law.

Other athletes have brought different combinations of antitrust, contract, equitable, and associational theories in other states.

That means an appellate win for the NCAA in one jurisdiction does not necessarily dispose of the theory being litigated somewhere else.

It also creates obvious incentives for forum selection.

If state contract law is more favorable than federal antitrust law, an athlete has every incentive to pursue the state-law route. If one jurisdiction develops favorable injunction precedent, other similarly situated athletes may try to reach that courthouse when jurisdiction and venue permit.

The result is not simply conflicting judgments.

It is the emergence of different legal pathways to eligibility.

For the Georgia plaintiffs, the immediate question is whether the Court of Appeals will reconsider or expedite its stay. Until then, the August 5 injunction is paused and athletes who depended on it cannot simply treat the trial-court order as continuing protection.

The merits appeal will matter considerably more.

If Georgia’s appellate courts eventually uphold the injunction, the state-law route could remain a powerful tool for athletes challenging NCAA transition decisions.

If they reverse it, the NCAA will have something more valuable than another emergency stay: actual appellate authority rejecting one of the strongest state-law challenges to the new eligibility framework.

For now, neither side has that.

What they have is a growing collection of temporary orders pointing in different directions.

And that may be the most important development of all.

The NCAA adopted its new eligibility model in part to make the system simpler, more predictable, and more consistent.

The rule itself may eventually accomplish that.

The transition is doing the opposite.

The Class of 2022 is now litigating across state and federal courts, trial and appellate courts, antitrust and contract theories, with eligibility sometimes changing faster than teams can update their rosters.

The Georgia Court of Appeals has given the NCAA another meaningful appellate victory.

It has not yet answered whether the NCAA’s rule is lawful.

That answer will come later.

For the players, the uncomfortable reality is that later may be too late.