Let’s just say the quiet part out loud: the NCAA is no longer governing college sports.
The courts are.
And before you cheer that on — because Lord knows the NCAA has earned its share of
contempt over the decades — take a breath and think about what we’re actually
watching happen here. Because what’s unfolding in federal and state courtrooms across
this country isn’t just about whether a kid gets to play another season of football. It’s
about who has the authority to run college athletics at all. And increasingly, the answer
seems to be whichever judge happens to be on duty that week.
That’s a problem. A serious one.

How Did We Get Here?
The snowball started rolling in 2021 when the Supreme Court handed down NCAA v.
Alston, a decision that took a sledgehammer to the NCAA’s long-standing amateurism
framework. The Court held that certain restrictions on education-related benefits for
student-athletes violated the Sherman Antitrust Act Flora Pettit — and in doing so,
essentially handed plaintiff attorneys a master key to challenge almost any NCAA rule
they didn’t like under the banner of antitrust law.
The NIL era followed. Revenue sharing followed that. And now, as if on cue, the
eligibility challenges are flooding in.
Recent cases have focused primarily on the NCAA’s Five-Year Rule, which requires
athletes to complete four seasons of competition within a five-year window that begins
on their first day of classes at any collegiate institution — including junior colleges.
Fisher Phillips Courts have been asked, again and again, to block the NCAA from
enforcing that rule against individual players. Some have obliged. Some haven’t. The
result is a chaotic patchwork of eligibility outcomes that varies district by district, circuit
by circuit.
Governance now operates in a hybrid environment where the NCAA’s rules remain
formally in place but their application can be altered through emergency judicial relief —
and this dynamic introduces variability across jurisdictions and competitive
environments. Morgan Lewis

That’s not governance. That’s a legal lottery.

The Antitrust Hook — And Why It’s Being Stretched
Here’s where this gets philosophically interesting, because the legal mechanism being
used — antitrust law — is a legitimate tool that’s being applied in an increasingly
aggressive and arguably expansive way.
The argument, in its cleanest form, goes like this: the NCAA and its member institutions
collectively agreed to limit how long athletes can compete. That agreement suppresses
a labor market. Because of NIL, that market now has real, quantifiable dollars attached
to it. Therefore, eligibility restrictions harm athletes financially and restrain trade.
It’s a coherent argument. Courts have reasoned that the Five-Year Rule may unfairly
suppress athlete compensation via NIL and potentially reduce competition in the market
for college athletes. Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney And in the Diego Pavia case, that
argument found a receptive ear in Tennessee federal court, ultimately forcing the
NCAA’s hand.
But here’s the question nobody in the sports media seems to be asking: if college
athletes are now, in practical and legal terms, employees — why are they getting
rights that ordinary at-will employees simply don’t have?
Think about that for a moment. An at-will employee at any company in America can be
released, benched, demoted, or told they’ve exceeded their contractual term with zero
court intervention — unless discrimination or a specific contractual breach is involved.
There are no unions protecting most of these athletes. There is no collective bargaining
agreement. There is no NLRB-certified labor organization sitting across the table from
the NCAA hammering out eligibility terms.
So outside of a discrimination claim — race, gender, disability — on what legal basis are
courts essentially giving individual athletes the power to overturn organizational
governance decisions through emergency injunctions?
The honest answer is: antitrust, applied very creatively, combined with some contract
law maneuvering when antitrust doesn’t stick.

The Chambliss Problem
The most recent example of this judicial creep is particularly telling. In the case of
Trinidad Chambliss, a Mississippi Chancery Court judge granted a preliminary injunction
allowing him to play for Ole Miss during the 2026-2027 season, ruling that the NCAA

had acted in bad faith and “fell short in its mission to foster the well-being of college
athletes” by denying his eligibility waiver. Front Office Sports
The legal theory here wasn’t even antitrust — it was breach of contract. Specifically,
Chambliss argued he was an intended third-party beneficiary of the contract between
the NCAA and its member institutions, and that the NCAA had failed to honor an implied
duty of good faith and fair dealing by unreasonably denying his waiver request. Morgan
Lewis
Now the NCAA, filing a 658-page brief to the Mississippi Supreme Court, is warning of
precisely the precedent problem I’m raising here. “If courts can intervene in NCAA
eligibility decisions to provide special treatment to favored athletes, then the NCAA’s
ability to ensure fair athletic competition in which all participants play by the same rules
will depend upon the whims of trial courts throughout the country,” the NCAA wrote.
Front Office Sports
For once, I agree with the NCAA’s framing — even if their track record on these issues
is anything but clean.

The Chaos Is Real
Let’s be honest about what court-by-court eligibility decisions are doing to the actual
sport.
Short-notice eligibility extensions granted through court intervention can materially
disrupt roster and scholarship planning. Athletics departments structure scholarship
allocation models, recruiting cycles, transfer portal strategy, and long-term roster
projections months — if not years — in advance. Morgan Lewis
When a judge in New Jersey grants a Rutgers player an injunction mid-season, or a
Mississippi state court awards a sixth year of eligibility to a quarterback right before fall
camp, every competing program is affected. Scholarships that were allocated for
incoming recruits get squeezed. Depth charts get blown up. The 18-year-old kid who
signed a letter of intent trusting in a roster spot finds himself displaced — not by a
coach’s decision, not by a rule, but by a court order he had no part in.
And the competitive integrity question is profound. The NCAA has argued that allowing
a player to compete through injunction places an unfair burden on Ole Miss’ opponents
during the 2026 season and could potentially affect other schools’ postseason
outcomes. Yahoo Sports

Whether you like the NCAA or not, that’s a legitimate concern. It’s hard to maintain a
level playing field when the eligibility rulebook can be selectively overridden for whoever
has a sharp enough attorney and a sympathetic judge.

The Deeper Problem: Identity Crisis
The courts are stepping in because the NCAA created a power vacuum. Decades of
heavy-handed enforcement, arbitrary waiver decisions, and tone-deaf resistance to
reasonable change invited this judicial scrutiny. Nobody is shedding tears for an
organization that spent 50 years monetizing amateur athletes while hiding behind the
word “scholarship.”
But the solution to a flawed governing body isn’t to replace it with ad-hoc judicial
governance. The solution is reform — ideally through federal legislation that creates a
coherent framework for college athlete compensation, eligibility, and yes, some form of
collective representation that actually gives athletes a seat at the table.
Because right now we have the worst of all worlds: athletes who are functionally
employees in everything but name, receiving revenue-share payments and million-dollar
NIL deals, but with none of the structural protections that come with actual employment
— no union, no collective bargaining, no defined grievance process. Into that vacuum,
courts are rushing with preliminary injunctions and emergency TROs as the only
available relief mechanism.
That’s not a system. That’s improvisation.

The At-Will Paradox
Here’s the core tension, and it deserves to be stated plainly.
If college athletes are at-will participants in a voluntary association — which has been
the NCAA’s foundational argument for a century — then the association’s rules
governing participation should stand unless they violate constitutional protections or
existing statute. Courts don’t tell employers how to structure job requirements for
at-will workers outside of discrimination law. The at-will doctrine blocks courts
from being involved in these workplace decisions, according to Raymond Nardo,
Esq., who practices Employment Law in New York. Further, Attorney Nardo

states that even within the context of employment discrimination claims – courts
still tend to defer to the employer’s judgment, often throwing their hands up in
the air, claiming that they are not “super personnel departments” designed to re-
examine an employer’s business decisions. “The courts,” according to Attorney
Nardo, “often decline to ‘video review’ the employer’s decisions, even when
discrimination claims are raised.”
But if college athletes are now employees — as the House v. NCAA settlement and
revenue-sharing arrangements increasingly suggest — then they need the full
architecture of employment law: collective bargaining rights, a recognized labor
organization, and a negotiated agreement that governs eligibility just as CBA terms
govern performance standards in professional sports.
You cannot have it both ways. Either these are voluntary participants in an amateur
association, in which case the courts should largely defer to NCAA governance absent
statutory violations, or they are employees, in which case Congress and the NLRB need
to step in and build a real framework.
What we have now is a legal no-man’s-land where courts are making it up as they go —
injunction by injunction, circuit by circuit — while the NCAA’s authority erodes like
sandstone in a rainstorm.

The Bottom Line
College sports is in the middle of a governance crisis that’s being papered over by the
excitement of NIL dollars and transfer portal drama. But underneath all of that is a
foundational question that nobody in power seems willing to answer directly: who
actually runs this thing?
Right now, the answer is: whoever files first in the friendliest jurisdiction.
That’s not sustainable. It’s not fair to athletes, it’s not fair to competing programs, and
it’s not fair to the millions of fans who just want to watch a game played on a level field.
The NCAA needs to be reformed, restructured, or replaced — but it needs to be done
through legislation and collective negotiation, not through an endless series of
emergency injunctions that turn every eligibility dispute into a federal case.
Because if we keep going down this road, we won’t have college sports. We’ll have
college litigation — with football on the side.