Provisional relief in college athletics

Thu 01 October 2026 in LawSchool

I wrote the following as extra credit for my civil procedure class as an example of how provisional relief is used in the real world, specifically in the ongoing litigation around college athletics. This comes right as Congress is in the process of reversing the Supreme Court in order to roll back one the biggest labor victories of the past decade.

I'm quite proud of what I submitted (I wrote twice the required length), so I'm sharing it here in the original form I turned it in in.

Historically the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) put a significant emphasis on players being amateurs: playing for the love of the game and not money. Meanwhile, coaches and administrators raked in billions off the backs of unpaid athletes, who never saw a dime. The courts have finally started to catch up with this crisis; the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in NCAA v. Alston (2021) that the NCAA’s restrictions against athletes from profiting off of their own name, image, likeness (NIL) was a violation of antitrust law. Justice Kavanaugh took it one step further in his concurrence, writing, “Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.” And lawyers all across the country have taken his words to heart, beating the NCAA in just about every major court case since.

Fast-forward to 2024, many college football players are being paid through the guise of NIL – in some cases earning generational wealth in a few years. So now plenty of other people want in on the money, setting up a legal battle over the NCAA’s previously ironclad eligibility rules. In short, athletes have four years of eligibility, but once you go pro (e.g. NFL, NBA) you can’t come back to NCAA sports.

In 2024, Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia sued the NCAA under the Sherman Antitrust Act, saying that the year he played football at a junior college shouldn’t count towards his eligibility because it limited his ability to profit in Division I football. He asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent the NCAA from enforcing its rules against him. Ruling in favor of Pavia, the judge walked through the same standards we learned in class: 1) likelihood of success on the merits: plaintiffs appear to meet the criteria the Supreme Court laid out in Alston, 2) irreparable harm: many courts have found that being unable to play sports is irreparable harm 3) balance of equities & public interest: it’s narrow towards Pavia only, and the public wants free and fair markets. (The judge combined parts 3 and 4 into one analysis step.) The motion for an injunction ended up being the entire battle, as the NCAA granted all junior college athletes an eligibility waiver, leading to the dismissal of Pavia’s case for mootness.

In 2025, the House v. NCAA settlement was finalized, allowing colleges to directly pay athletes through revenue-sharing. The next fight over eligibility was for people who technically went pro, but didn’t properly make it, so they wanted to come back to college to earn a stable income (and presumably also to study).

Despite having previously signed an NBA contract, former University of Alabama basketball player Charles Bediako tried to make a comeback, and sued the NCAA in early 2026 after they denied his eligibility. In state court, Bediako won a temporary restraining order for 10 days, allowing him to play. Five games later, the same judge – an Alabama alumnus – reversed his position, denying Bediako’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Bediako’s situation illustrates the different circumstances between temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.

Right as we were discussing provisional relief in class, two former University of Mississippi football players, who signed pro contracts and participated in NFL training camps, attempted to play at LSU with their former coach. A Louisiana state judge granted them a temporary restraining order against the NCAA from enforcing eligibility rules on August 19th. The Southeastern Conference (SEC), of which Mississippi, Alabama, and LSU are all members, then passed a policy banning former professional players. The players responded by filing for and receiving an expanded temporary restraining order that covered the SEC too on August 28th. After a hearing, the judge granted them a preliminary injunction on September 3th – two days before LSU’s first game on the 5th. Unhappy with the outcome, the NCAA and SEC filed suit in federal court asking for their own injunctions. As best I can tell, that litigation is still pending, but it may be moot. Multiple opponents threatened to cancel their games with LSU, and the rest of the SEC threatened to kick LSU out of the conference entirely, so in the end, the coach didn't add either player to the final roster despite both of them thoroughly winning in court.

To some extent this whole situation is ridiculous, you can’t run a coherent sports league when random state judges – often alumni of the school in question – are issuing temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions and then flip-flopping each week. The NCAA also appears to not be interested in letting cases actually get decided on the merits to avoid the risk of losing. Instead it’s taken its case to Congress, which is working on a “Protect College Sports Act” to take away legal victories from athletes and “protect” coaches’ and universities’ profits.

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