The NCAA’s Eligibility Rules Are Subject to Antitrust Law. That Doesn’t Mean Every Athlete Wins.

Case Analysis | September 10, 2026

The NCAA’s Eligibility Rules Are Subject to Antitrust Law. That Doesn’t Mean Every Athlete Wins.

The NCAA won Blythe v. NCAA.

It may still wish the Ninth Circuit had said less.

In a published opinion issued September 9, the Ninth Circuit held that the NCAA’s traditional Five-Year Rule is a commercial restraint subject to the Sherman Act. That is a significant loss for the NCAA’s longstanding effort to place at least some “pure” eligibility rules outside antitrust law altogether.

But the court then handed the NCAA the result it wanted.

College baseball player Noah Blythe could not keep his preliminary injunction because he had not actually supplied the economic evidence necessary to prove that the rule harmed competition in a properly defined market. His individual exclusion from Division I baseball may have injured him. Antitrust law requires something more: injury to competition.

That combination makes Blythe much more important than another athlete winning or losing an eligibility case.

The Ninth Circuit essentially said two things at once:

The NCAA does not get antitrust immunity merely by calling something an eligibility rule. But an athlete does not get an antitrust victory merely by showing that the rule kept him off the field.

That is the new map.

And that last point may ultimately be Blythe’s most consequential one.

Blythe’s path through college baseball was unusual, but increasingly familiar in an era of transfers and changing eligibility rules.

He began at Division II Hawaii Pacific University in 2020. He then transferred to the University of Antelope Valley, an NAIA institution, where he spent three years. Antelope Valley closed during his final baseball season there, and Blythe returned to Hawaii Pacific in 2024.

He eventually transferred to the University of Nevada, Reno, which sought a waiver that would allow him to play Division I baseball in 2026. The conference denied the request, and the NCAA denied the appeal.

The obstacle was the NCAA’s traditional Five-Year Rule.

Despite its name, that rule did not give an athlete five seasons. Former Bylaw 12.6 generally permitted four seasons of competition within five calendar years beginning with initial full-time collegiate enrollment, and the clock included time at qualifying non-NCAA institutions.

Blythe sued under Section 1 of the Sherman Act and obtained a preliminary injunction from a Nevada federal judge. He began playing for Nevada while the NCAA appealed.

On April 8, the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction immediately. What it did not provide then was a full explanation.

That arrived September 9.

And the explanation matters far beyond one baseball player.

For years, the NCAA had a potentially powerful distinction available to it.

Compensation rules were commercial.

True eligibility rules, the argument went, were different.

There was even language in the Ninth Circuit’s own 2015 O’Bannon decision suggesting that rules limiting how many years an athlete may compete might qualify as genuinely noncommercial eligibility rules.

The Ninth Circuit has now made clear that language was dicta—and that Alston changed the analytical landscape.

The Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston rejected the NCAA’s request for a special antitrust exemption based on amateurism and emphasized that restraints affecting interstate commerce remain subject to ordinary Sherman Act principles. Alston dealt with restrictions on education-related compensation, not the Five-Year Rule. But the Ninth Circuit read its reasoning more broadly: if an NCAA eligibility rule affects commerce, calling it an “eligibility rule” does not immunize it.

That conclusion puts the Ninth Circuit alongside three other federal appellate courts.

The Third Circuit in Elad, the Seventh Circuit in Fourqurean, and the Fourth Circuit in Robinson have all concluded that the Five-Year Rule can be subjected to Sherman Act review. The Ninth Circuit expressly joined them.

That emerging consensus is significant.

The NCAA may still defend eligibility restrictions.

It just cannot avoid the antitrust question by changing the label on the rule.

“Eligibility” describes what the rule regulates. It does not determine whether the Sherman Act applies.

This is where Blythe becomes especially useful.

It would be easy to read Alston and the recent eligibility cases as establishing something like this:

The NCAA collectively restricts athletes. The NCAA has enormous market power. Therefore, the restriction is probably anticompetitive.

That is not how the rule of reason works.

Section 1 prohibits unreasonable restraints of trade, not every rule that inconveniences or harms an individual market participant.

Under the ordinary rule-of-reason framework, the plaintiff begins with the burden of showing that the challenged restraint causes a substantial anticompetitive effect in a properly defined relevant market. Only then does the burden shift to the NCAA to offer a procompetitive justification. If it does, the plaintiff can attempt to show that the same benefits could be achieved through a less restrictive alternative.

Blythe never made it past step one.

That is crucial.

The Ninth Circuit did not hold that the Five-Year Rule is reasonable.

It did not approve the NCAA’s justifications for it.

And it did not decide that there are no less restrictive alternatives.

Instead, it said Blythe had not produced enough evidence to require those questions to be answered.

Blythe characterized the relevant market as the Division I collegiate baseball labor market.

Conceptually, that is plausible.

Legally, plausibility was not enough.

A relevant labor market consists, broadly speaking, of the employers workers regard as reasonable substitutes for one another. That means a plaintiff trying to isolate Division I baseball must explain why other opportunities do—or do not—belong in the market.

Are Division II programs reasonable substitutes?

What about Division III?

NAIA baseball?

Junior colleges?

Minor-league or other professional baseball opportunities?

Foreign leagues or institutions?

And how does geography affect those choices?

Those are not rhetorical questions. In antitrust law, they are factual ones.

Blythe largely tried to bridge that gap with generalized NIL statistics, evidence that 71% of the 2025 MLB Draft class came from Division I programs, and his own experience that he had not received NIL opportunities while playing outside Division I. The Ninth Circuit found that insufficient. None of it adequately showed who competes in the asserted labor market, which alternatives athletes view as reasonably interchangeable, or where the market’s boundaries actually lie.

That is an important correction to a tendency in recent NCAA litigation.

A plaintiff cannot simply borrow the market definition from Alston.

Alston involved athletic services in Division I basketball and FBS football. Blythe played baseball. More fundamentally, the market itself has changed dramatically since Alston was litigated. NIL compensation did not exist in its current form then. Direct institutional payments under the House settlement did not exist. Today, participating Division I schools can provide millions of dollars in direct benefits to athletes in addition to third-party NIL compensation.

That means yesterday’s accepted market definition cannot simply be photocopied into tomorrow’s case.

Antitrust law cares about market realities. College sports has spent the last five years rewriting them.

Blythe faced a second—and perhaps even more important—problem.

He had evidence that the rule harmed Blythe.

He did not have sufficient evidence that the rule harmed competition.

That distinction can feel artificial in an eligibility dispute. If several competing universities collectively agree to a rule preventing a willing athlete from playing for any of them, it is intuitive to describe the arrangement as a restraint.

But antitrust liability requires analysis of what that restraint does to the market as a whole.

The Ninth Circuit emphasized that Blythe did not demonstrate that the rule depressed athlete compensation, protected the NCAA from competition by rival organizations, materially reduced competition among schools for athlete services, or otherwise produced substantial market-wide anticompetitive effects.

The court even highlighted an economic complication borrowed from the Seventh Circuit’s Fourqurean decision: if the Five-Year Rule reduces the supply of experienced athletes available in the labor market, basic supply-and-demand principles could theoretically increase compensation for the athletes who remain.

That does not prove the rule is procompetitive.

It shows why the plaintiff must identify the actual mechanism of competitive harm.

“An athlete was excluded” is an injury story.

“Competing employers jointly imposed a restriction that materially distorted competition in a defined labor market” is an antitrust story.

The two can overlap.

They are not interchangeable.

The pattern across the appellate courts is becoming striking.

The Third, Fourth, Seventh, and now Ninth Circuits have rejected the idea that the Five-Year Rule is categorically beyond antitrust scrutiny.

Yet those same appellate courts have reversed preliminary injunctions because the athlete-plaintiffs failed to develop adequate evidence of the relevant market or anticompetitive effects.

So the courthouse door is open.

Athletes keep getting stopped a few steps inside.

That changes how these cases should be litigated.

An athlete seeking an emergency injunction cannot safely treat market definition as something to prove after discovery. The athletic calendar makes that tempting: eligibility disputes arise quickly, seasons start on fixed dates, and the practical objective is often to get on the field before the lawsuit becomes moot in everything but name.

But Blythe says the extraordinary timing of a sports dispute does not eliminate the plaintiff’s antitrust burden.

If the theory is antitrust, the emergency motion may need to be built like an antitrust case from day one.

For a future plaintiff, that likely means economic evidence addressing the actual market before filing the injunction motion: where athletes realistically can sell their services; whether Division I programs compete as a distinct group for those services; how NIL and revenue-sharing compensation affect substitution decisions; what programs are willing to offer athletes excluded by the rule; how many athletes the rule removes from competition; what happens to recruiting, compensation, mobility, or output when those athletes disappear; and whether professional or lower-division alternatives genuinely substitute for the Division I opportunity.

An expert economist may no longer be a luxury reserved for summary judgment.

In the right eligibility case, the economist may be part of the emergency-relief team.

Blythe does not foreclose the proposition that eligibility restrictions harm competition.

It says Blythe did not prove it.

A stronger case would likely focus less on the abstract unfairness of removing one athlete and more directly on the horizontal agreement among competing schools.

Division I programs compete with one another for player services. An NCAA eligibility rule can function as a collective agreement governing which workers those competing institutions may hire.

That fact alone does not make the agreement unlawful. Sports leagues necessarily require some cooperation among competitors; there is no game unless the teams agree on rules.

But Alston teaches that necessary cooperation does not generate automatic immunity for every restraint the association adopts.

The real inquiry is whether the particular restriction restrains competition more than is reasonably necessary to produce the collegiate product.

A properly developed plaintiff might therefore attempt to show that the rule materially prevents schools from competing for an identifiable class of willing athletes, reduces athlete mobility or economic opportunity across the market, limits forms of non-price competition, or otherwise alters competitive conditions in a measurable way.

The key word is show.

After Blythe, intuition is not enough.

There is an important lesson on the other side.

The NCAA’s categorical argument—that genuine eligibility rules simply are not commercial—looks increasingly difficult to sustain.

Four federal circuits have now said otherwise.

That does not leave the NCAA defenseless. It changes where the defense should be concentrated.

The NCAA can attack the plaintiff’s market definition. It can challenge proposed substitutes and geographic boundaries. It can insist on evidence of market-wide competitive effects rather than athlete-specific hardship. And if the plaintiff clears those hurdles, the NCAA can still argue that eligibility limits serve legitimate procompetitive objectives such as preserving a distinct collegiate product, maintaining the relationship between athletics and education, producing roster turnover, or protecting competitive opportunities for successive generations of athletes.

Then comes another fight: whether those goals could be achieved through something less restrictive.

Blythe never reached either of those latter stages.

That unresolved territory may ultimately be where the legality of NCAA eligibility restrictions is decided.

There is a terminology trap here.

The “Five-Year Rule” challenged in Blythe is the old rule: generally four seasons of competition within a five-year clock.

Division I has since adopted a new age-based eligibility model. For athletes governed by the new system, the NCAA has eliminated the traditional seasons-of-competition framework and generally provides a continuous five-year eligibility period triggered by full-time enrollment or age, subject to transition rules and limited exceptions. Full implementation begins with the fall 2027 incoming class, while certain current athletes and 2026 entrants receive the more favorable of the old and new frameworks.

That does not make Blythe obsolete.

Quite the opposite.

The specific rule may be changing, but the Ninth Circuit’s threshold holding concerns a much larger proposition: an NCAA rule restricting athlete eligibility does not escape the Sherman Act merely because eligibility is its subject matter.

The new age-based system, its transition rules, professional-participation restrictions, and whatever eligibility rules come next will still have to be analyzed on their own economic facts.

And the NCAA’s rapidly changing compensation system makes those facts more complicated every year.

Judge Mark Bennett agreed that Blythe had not shown enough to justify the injunction, but he would have stopped there.

In his view, the sparse evidentiary record made it unnecessary—and potentially unwise—to decide whether the Five-Year Rule was commercial in the first place. Antitrust analysis is highly sensitive to market realities, he reasoned, and this record contained very little evidence about those realities.

That does not diminish the majority’s holding. The Ninth Circuit has now held that the rule is commercial and subject to Sherman Act review.

But the concurrence reinforces the larger theme of the opinion:

Evidence matters at every level of the analysis.

The easiest way to misunderstand Blythe is to call it an NCAA victory.

The NCAA certainly won the appeal.

But it lost an argument that could have prevented entire categories of eligibility litigation from reaching antitrust scrutiny at all.

The easiest way to misunderstand it in the other direction is to call it an athlete victory because eligibility rules are now subject to antitrust law.

Blythe himself lost.

And the reason he lost may shape these cases more than the threshold holding does.

Alston dismantled the idea that college sports occupies a special antitrust-free zone. Blythe confirms that the lesson extends beyond compensation rules. But neither case turned the Sherman Act into a federal eligibility-waiver statute.

Athletes still have to define a market.

They still have to prove harm to competition.

They still have to connect the restriction imposed on them personally to the way competition operates across that market.

And because eligibility cases move on the unforgiving clock of an athletic season, they may have to do all of that very quickly.

That is what makes Blythe important.

The NCAA can no longer win merely by saying, “This is an eligibility rule.”

The athlete can no longer win merely by saying, “This rule makes me ineligible.”

The battlefield is now in between—and it is going to be fought with evidence.

Read the Ninth Circuit’s published opinion in Blythe v. NCAA

I think this is the right length and depth for a flagship Case Analysis: it explains the holding, identifies the subtle procedural point, distinguishes commerciality from illegality, and—most importantly—shows readers how the next eligibility case would actually need to be litigated differently after Blythe. That last layer is what makes the article demonstrate litigation expertise without sounding like an advertisement.