The Season Moves Faster Than the Courts

Strategic Analysis | September 10, 2026

The Ninth Circuit began its September 9 opinion with a sports metaphor because, in this case, the metaphor was the law.

The “game clock has run out,” Judge Gabriel Sanchez wrote.

That was enough to decide the appeals.

Cortez Braham Jr. and Tatuo Martinson began their college careers at junior colleges in 2019 before eventually reaching Division I football. Both ran into the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule, which generally requires an athlete to complete four seasons of competition within five calendar years beginning with full-time college enrollment—including time spent at a junior college.

In separate lawsuits filed in Nevada in 2025, both players argued that applying the Five-Year Rule to their junior-college years unlawfully restrained the market for college-athlete labor in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

Both won preliminary injunctions.

Judge Miranda Du granted Braham relief in July 2025. Judge Richard Boulware later did the same for Martinson, a UNLV defensive lineman, concluding on the preliminary record that enforcement of the rule likely constituted an unlawful restraint on the rapidly changing market for college football services. The injunctions also addressed the NCAA’s Rule of Restitution—the rule that can expose a school to sanctions when it relies on a court order allowing an athlete to compete and that order is later vacated or reversed.

The NCAA appealed.

But Braham and Martinson played.

Then the 2025 season ended.

By the time the Ninth Circuit heard argument on March 13, 2026, the temporary relief had already accomplished exactly what the players asked it to accomplish: they had received the opportunity to play the disputed season. The Ninth Circuit could reverse the legal ruling. It could not reverse the calendar.

That distinction decided the appeals.

Article III permits federal courts to decide actual “cases” and “controversies.” A court cannot issue an opinion merely because an interesting legal question remains unresolved. There must still be some effective relief the court can give the parties before it.

For Braham and Martinson, there was not.

Their preliminary injunctions concerned the 2025 season. That season was finished. Their college careers were finished. Reversing the injunctions would not take games out of the record books or return the players to the sidelines retroactively.

So the appeals were moot.

That produces the first important lesson from the decision:

In eligibility litigation, temporary relief can become permanent in effect long before anyone permanently decides the law.

A preliminary injunction is supposed to preserve the parties’ positions while litigation proceeds. It is not supposed to be the final adjudication.

But sports do not operate on litigation time.

An athlete has a season. The season has a schedule. Every Saturday that passes cannot be restored through damages or a later appellate decision.

The result is an unusual form of procedural asymmetry.

If the athlete loses the preliminary-injunction motion, he may lose the season before proving his case.

If the athlete wins it, he may receive practically everything he needs before the NCAA can prove the injunction was wrongly entered.

The merits matter. But sometimes the calendar gets there first.

The NCAA saw the obvious problem and invoked one of mootness doctrine’s best-known exceptions: disputes that are “capable of repetition, yet evading review.”

At first glance, that argument seems tailor-made for college eligibility.

These cases plainly repeat. Athletes around the country have challenged the Five-Year Rule, junior-college restrictions, seasons-of-competition rules, professional-participation rules, transfer rules, and waiver decisions. And athletic seasons are short enough that litigation can struggle to keep pace.

But the doctrine is narrower than its name suggests.

Ordinarily, it is not enough that the legal issue will repeat. There must be a reasonable expectation that the same complaining party will again face the challenged action.

That was fatal here.

Braham and Martinson had finished their collegiate careers. Neither was expected to come back the following year and seek another season. The NCAA argued that it would unquestionably face similar lawsuits from other athletes.

The Ninth Circuit essentially responded: that is not the test.

The court relied on familiar Supreme Court mootness principles. A controversy does not remain alive merely because a defendant is likely to face a similar claim from someone else later. The exception generally remains tied to recurrence between the parties actually before the court.

And that creates an awkward fit for eligibility disputes.

The NCAA may confront the same challenge repeatedly.

But the identity of the athlete keeps changing.

The distinction becomes clearer when Braham is compared with the Fourth Circuit’s 2026 decision in Robinson v. NCAA.

There, the court did reach an NCAA eligibility appeal despite the expiration of the season because one of the players, Tye Edwards, had sought eligibility for another season. That created a realistic possibility that the same plaintiff would again encounter the same NCAA restriction.

That fact was missing in Braham.

This is a small doctrinal distinction with enormous practical consequences.

A player seeking only one final season may be able to obtain an injunction, finish his career, and leave the underlying appellate dispute behind him.

A player seeking multiple additional seasons may keep the controversy alive long enough for an appellate court to decide whether the injunction should have been entered.

Same NCAA rule. Similar legal theory. Completely different jurisdictional result.

That is why eligibility litigation cannot be analyzed only by asking what rule is being challenged.

You also have to ask how much eligibility is left when the challenge begins.

The NCAA had another argument.

Its Rule of Restitution permits the association to penalize a member institution when the school allows an athlete to compete pursuant to an injunction that is later vacated, stayed, or reversed.

That rule has always mattered strategically. An injunction allowing the athlete to play means little if the university fears that complying with it may later produce institutional sanctions.

Indeed, eligibility plaintiffs routinely seek protection from the Rule of Restitution for precisely that reason.

The NCAA argued in Braham that the possibility of later action against the schools meant something remained live even though the players’ seasons were over.

The Ninth Circuit disagreed. The preliminary injunctions did not operate indefinitely to protect nonparty institutions after the athletes’ alleged injuries ended. And potential consequences for the schools did not create effective relief that could still matter to Braham or Martinson.

That does not make the Rule of Restitution irrelevant.

Far from it.

But it does mean the rule cannot automatically rescue an otherwise moot athlete-specific appeal merely because institutional consequences might linger after the athlete leaves.

The Ninth Circuit did not simply dismiss the appeals.

It also vacated the district courts’ preliminary-injunction orders under the doctrine associated with United States v. Munsingwear.

That is an important distinction.

The NCAA did not obtain an appellate ruling holding that the district courts were wrong.

Braham and Martinson did not obtain an appellate ruling holding that they were right.

Instead, the appellate court removed the unreviewed injunction orders after events made appellate review impossible.

The law therefore ends in an unusual place.

The district-court orders are gone.

The appellate merits decision never happened.

But the games were played.

That is the essential asymmetry of the case:

The legal victory disappeared. The practical victory did not.

Any surviving merits or damages issues in the underlying cases are separate questions for the district courts; the Ninth Circuit decided only that these preliminary-injunction appeals no longer presented live controversies.

The Ninth Circuit made another eligibility decision on September 9 that makes Braham even more instructive.

In Blythe v. NCAA, the court confronted another challenge to the Five-Year Rule—this time involving college baseball player Noah Blythe.

There, the appellate process moved quickly enough to matter.

The Ninth Circuit heard argument on April 7, 2026 and vacated Blythe’s injunction the next day, while the baseball season was still underway. Its full September 9 opinion then explained why: although the Five-Year Rule is a commercial restraint subject to Sherman Act scrutiny, Blythe had offered insufficient evidence defining the relevant labor market and establishing substantial anticompetitive effects.

That makes Braham and Blythe an unusually useful pair.

Blythe tells athletes what they must prove.

Braham tells everyone how quickly they may have to prove it.

The same Ninth Circuit that said Braham had become impossible to decide also demonstrated in Blythe that eligibility appeals do not necessarily evade review. When appellate intervention occurs while the season remains live, the court can still alter the real-world outcome.

That is why Braham should not be read as establishing some universal loophole through which athletes can obtain unreviewable injunctions.

The better conclusion is narrower—and more important:

Procedure is now part of the substantive strategy of college-sports litigation.

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

That changes how both sides should think about these cases.

In conventional commercial litigation, a preliminary injunction is usually the opening act. Discovery follows. Experts testify. Summary judgment arrives. Perhaps there is a trial. Appellate review eventually produces controlling law.

Eligibility litigation compresses that sequence.

The athlete may need meaningful relief within days.

A coach may need a roster answer by Friday.

The transfer portal may close.

Revenue-sharing opportunities may disappear.

A professional draft decision may become irreversible.

And the disputed season may be half over before briefing on the appeal is complete.

As a result, the preliminary-injunction record carries unusual weight.

For the athlete, that means the temptation to treat emergency relief as an equitable plea—I will lose my final season—is no longer enough. Blythe makes clear that an antitrust plaintiff still needs evidence on market definition and competitive effects.

For the NCAA, Braham shows why winning the ultimate doctrinal argument may accomplish very little if the appellate ruling arrives after the athlete has received the disputed season.

The practical litigation question therefore becomes not merely who has the stronger argument?

It becomes:

Who can get a meaningful judicial answer while the answer still matters?

Much has been written about the NCAA’s governance problem.

There are now courts, conferences, schools, the College Sports Commission, state legislatures, Congress, and the NCAA itself exercising overlapping authority across college athletics.

But Braham exposes a different dimension of the same problem.

The legal system and the sports calendar run at fundamentally different speeds.

Courts value developed records, orderly briefing, adversarial testing, and appellate review.

Sports require eligibility answers now.

Those two systems were never designed for each other.

And direct athlete compensation has only raised the stakes. A disputed season can now involve far more than the intangible opportunity to compete. It may carry NIL income, revenue-sharing compensation, draft exposure, professional development, and meaningful present economic value.

That makes emergency litigation more attractive and delay more costly.

It also increases the pressure on trial judges. Denying an injunction may effectively decide the athlete’s career before the merits are reached. Granting one may effectively decide the dispute before the appellate court can review it.

Either way, a supposedly preliminary ruling can become the decision that matters most.

The Ninth Circuit did not decide whether Braham or Martinson should have received another season.

It did not decide whether the Five-Year Rule violated the Sherman Act as applied to them.

And it did not vindicate the NCAA’s eligibility framework.

It decided something both narrower and, strategically, almost as important:

By the time an appellate court was ready to rule, there was no season left to save or stop.

That reality will shape future eligibility litigation.

Athletes will continue seeking emergency relief because waiting for final judgment is often no relief at all. The NCAA will have every incentive to seek stays and accelerated appellate decisions before a temporary injunction becomes practically irreversible. Courts will increasingly have to determine whether ordinary litigation timelines can accommodate disputes whose useful life may be measured in Saturdays.

And lawyers handling these cases will have to think about jurisdiction, mootness, injunction scope, appellate timing, the Rule of Restitution, market evidence, and the athletic calendar as parts of the same strategy.

Because in college-sports litigation, there are now two clocks.

One belongs to the court.

The other belongs to the season.

And Braham is a reminder that the season does not wait for the court to catch up.

Read the Ninth Circuit’s published Braham/Martinson opinion