NCAA Eligibility Lawsuits: Patterson, Martinson, and Five-For-Five

NCAA eligibility lawsuits are a wave of more than 70 antitrust cases filed since late 2024 by college athletes challenging the association’s rule that limits them to four seasons of competition within a five-year window. The suits argue the cap illegally restrains a commercial labor market now defined by name, image, and likeness earnings. Courts have split sharply on the question, the NCAA has proposed replacing the rule with a new “Five-For-Five” model, and the White House has weighed in with an executive order.

The Rule the Lawsuits Target

The NCAA’s Division I bylaws give an athlete four seasons of competition inside five calendar years of initial full-time college enrollment. The clock keeps running through redshirt years, injuries, and transfers. When the five years end, eligibility ends, whether the athlete played four seasons or two.

Two things changed the legal calculus around that rule. In 2021, the Supreme Court held unanimously in NCAA v. Alston that NCAA compensation restrictions get full antitrust scrutiny under the Sherman Act, with no special immunity for the association.{¹} Then NIL deals turned college athletes into paid participants in a commercial market, making season caps look less like academic guardrails and more like restraints on trade.

What Athletes Are Arguing

The core theory is that NCAA member schools are horizontal competitors in a market for athletic labor, and their collective agreement to cap competitive seasons restrains trade under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Because Division I athletics is now the “only meaningful gateway” to NIL income and revenue-sharing payments for most college athletes, limiting seasons directly limits earnings.{²}

Plaintiffs also point to inconsistent application of the clock. Former junior college players see their JUCO years counted against them even if they never competed in NCAA sanctioned sports. In one filing, attorney Ryan Downton cited Baylor basketball center James Nnaji, a former NBA draft pick granted four years of college eligibility despite professional experience, as evidence the NCAA’s line-drawing is arbitrary.{³}

Athletes lean on O’Bannon and Alston for the proposition that NCAA eligibility rules restricting compensation are commercial in nature despite being framed as academic, and that the NCAA holds monopsony power over athlete labor.{⁴}{¹}

How the NCAA Is Defending the Rule

The NCAA calls its eligibility rules “noncommercial” and therefore outside the Sherman Act, distinguishing them from the compensation rules struck down in House and Alston.{⁵} It argues member schools voluntarily adopted these standards and that it needs authority to enforce them uniformly.

The association also challenges standing. Athletes are not parties to the NCAA Division I Manual, which is a contract between the organization and its member schools, and in some courts the NCAA has convinced judges that athletes cannot claim third-party beneficiary status.{⁶}

One further weapon in the NCAA’s arsenal matters for any athlete considering a suit: the “Rule of Restitution.” It empowers the NCAA to punish schools that let athletes compete under a court injunction if that injunction is later reversed on appeal.{⁵}

The Cases Driving the Fight

Patterson v. NCAA

On September 2, 2025, Vanderbilt football players Langston Patterson, Issa Ouattara, CJ Taylor, and Quincy Skinner Jr. filed a proposed class action in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee seeking to represent thousands of current and former Division I athletes.{⁷} The suit asks the court to force the NCAA to let athletes compete during all five years they remain eligible to be on a roster.{⁸}

Chief Judge William Campbell denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction on January 15, 2026, finding they had not shown a likelihood of success on the merits. As of May 2026, the case remained in early stages with no ruling on class certification.{⁹}

Martinson v. NCAA and the Ninth Circuit

San Diego State defensive lineman Tatuo Martinson challenged the piece of the rule that counts junior college time against a Division I athlete’s five-year clock. On September 18, 2025, Judge Richard Boulware granted a preliminary injunction blocking the NCAA from applying that count to Martinson.{¹⁰}

Boulware described college football players as participants in a “labor market for competitive college football services” and called the Five-Year Rule “an undue restraint on trade imposed by the NCAA’s monopsony power.” He rejected the “true eligibility rule” defense, finding the post-NIL landscape had converted athletes into compensated workers, and pointed to a less restrictive alternative: starting the clock only at NCAA enrollment.{¹¹}

The NCAA appealed. A Ninth Circuit panel heard oral argument on March 13, 2026, in the consolidated appeals of Martinson and a similar Memphis case involving wide receiver Cortez Braham Jr. The judges pressed both sides on mootness, since both athletes had already played their seasons under the district court orders.{⁵}

Other Cases Athletes and Schools Are Watching

Zeigler v. NCAA (E.D. Tenn.): Former Tennessee basketball player Zakai Zeigler said the four-season cap cost him $2 million to $4 million in NIL income. His preliminary injunction motion was denied on June 13, 2025.{}¹²
Fourqurean v. NCAA (7th Cir.): The Seventh Circuit reversed a lower-court injunction on July 16, 2025, finding “sparse and conclusory allegations” on the relevant market. Dismissed with prejudice in November 2025.{}¹³
Elad v. NCAA (3rd Cir.): The Third Circuit reversed a preliminary injunction on November 25, 2025, then dismissed with prejudice for failure to properly define the relevant market.{}¹³
Chambliss v. NCAA (Miss. Chancery Court): In February 2026, Judge Robert Whitwell granted Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss a sixth year, finding the NCAA ignored medical documentation from his time at Ferris State. The NCAA appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court.{}¹⁴
Heinecke v. NCAA (Cleveland County, Okla.): On April 16, 2026, Judge Thad Balkman granted Oklahoma linebacker Owen Heinecke an extra season, finding the NCAA’s denial arbitrary. Appeal pending at the Oklahoma Supreme Court.{}¹⁵
Ortega v. NCAA (S.D. Iowa): Iowa State wrestler Reineri Andreu Ortega, arguing the rule penalizes athletes educated outside the NCAA system, lost his preliminary injunction on April 23, 2026.{}¹⁶
Keanaaina v. NCAA (D. Colo.): Cal-Berkeley football player Aidan Keanaaina’s medical-waiver challenge was dismissed without prejudice on May 4, 2026, for lack of personal jurisdiction over the NCAA in Colorado.{}¹⁷

Why the Rulings Contradict Each Other

Federal appellate courts have generally sided with the NCAA. The Third, Sixth, and Seventh Circuits have demanded rigorous economic evidence defining the relevant market and showing market-wide anticompetitive harm, a standard most athletes have failed to meet. State courts have been more receptive, often granting injunctions on contract or good-faith theories that skip the federal antitrust framework entirely. As of mid-2026 the NCAA has prevailed in most cases overall, but athletes have won at a notably higher rate in state courts.{¹⁸}

The Chambliss case in Mississippi shows how far state-court reasoning can diverge. It turned on whether the NCAA properly applied its own medical hardship waiver, not on any antitrust theory.{¹⁴}

The House v. NCAA settlement, approved June 6, 2025, is a separate matter. It resolved compensation and revenue-sharing claims but left eligibility limits untouched, and that gap is what the eligibility plaintiffs are exploiting. Judge Boulware pointed to House in Martinson as marking the end of the old amateur/professional distinction.{¹⁹}

The NCAA’s Proposed Replacement: Five-For-Five

On April 27, 2026, the Division I Board of Directors directed the Division I Cabinet to advance an age-based eligibility model called “Five-For-Five.”{²⁰}

Under the proposal, athletes get five full seasons of competition within a five-year window. The clock starts at initial full-time college enrollment or the academic year following the athlete’s 19th birthday, whichever comes first. The redshirt-versus-competitive distinction largely disappears; no one has to sit out a year inside the window to preserve eligibility.{²¹}

Most eligibility waivers would go away. Exceptions would remain only for pregnancy, active-duty military service, and official religious missions. Athletes with remaining eligibility after 2025-26 would be evaluated under whichever model, old or new, is more favorable to them. Athletes who already exhausted four seasons by spring 2026 get no additional eligibility. The deadline for hardship waiver requests under the current system is July 31, 2026.{²²}

On June 5, 2026, the Cabinet refined the model, dropping language that would have started the clock at high school graduation and anchoring it instead to college enrollment or the 19th birthday. A formal vote was expected at the Cabinet’s June 23-24 meeting.{²³}

The Trump Executive Order and Pending Legislation

On April 3, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for a five-year participation window for student-athletes and limiting athletes to one free transfer per five-year period, with one additional transfer permitted after obtaining a four-year degree. The order also directed the NCAA to create a national registry of player agents and to protect women’s and Olympic sports from revenue-sharing impacts.{²⁴}

NCAA President Charlie Baker said the order “reinforces many of our mandatory protections” but that lasting stability still requires bipartisan federal legislation. A bill called the Protect College Sports Act, which would grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, was reportedly heading to the full Senate for a vote.{²⁴}

What This Means for Athletes and Schools Right Now

The result on the ground is a hybrid system. The NCAA’s rules remain formally in force, but they are subject to piecemeal override by emergency court orders that vary by jurisdiction. An athlete denied eligibility in federal court in Iowa may still get it from a state court judge in Oklahoma or Mississippi. Schools that let athletes play under an injunction risk NCAA restitution if the order is later reversed, a calculation athletic departments have to make in real time.

An athlete considering a suit should know the pattern the cases have shown: federal courts want a defined relevant market and detailed anticompetitive-harm evidence, and preliminary injunctions won at the district level have been reversed on appeal in the Third and Seventh Circuits. State-court paths, particularly claims that the NCAA misapplied its own bylaws or acted arbitrarily on a hardship waiver, have produced more athlete wins but expose schools to the restitution risk.

Whether the Five-For-Five proposal, a federal antitrust exemption, or continued litigation ultimately settles the question is still open. The commercial framework of college athletics has moved past the amateur model the eligibility rules were built for, and the courts, Congress, and the NCAA are each moving to catch up on a different track.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston
2
NIL Revolution. The Five-Year Rule Under Fire Again: Ortega v. NCAA
3
Yahoo Sports. Lawyer in Diego Pavia’s Eligibility Lawsuit Files New Memorandum
4
University of Iowa Journal of Corporation Law. O’Bannon and Amateurism
5
Courthouse News Service. NCAA Defends Rickety Eligibility Rules at Ninth Circuit
6
Sportico. NCAA Eligibility Lawsuits and Rules Reform
7
Reuters. NCAA Faces New Class Action Over Sport Eligibility Caps, Redshirt Rule
8
ESPN. Two Vanderbilt Players Suing NCAA to Extend Eligibility
9
CourtListener. Patterson v. National Collegiate Athletic Association
10
Justia. Martinson v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2:25-cv-01376
11
Loyola Law School Entertainment Law Review. Tatuo Martinson Secures Eligibility for the 2025-2026 Season
12
Venable LLP. Zeigler v. NCAA: Four Seasons Rule Again Under Challenge
13
Sports Litigation Alert. Elad, Pavia, and Other NCAA Eligibility Cases
14
ESPN. NCAA Appealing Ruling Granting Ole Miss QB Chambliss 6th Year
15
Sports Litigation Alert. Oklahoma Linebacker Overcomes NCAA Opposition to Win Injunction to Play in 2026
16
Bloomberg Law. Cuban Wrestler Suing NCAA Can’t Compete Next Season, Judge Says
17
Courthouse News Service. Keanaaina v. NCAA Opinion
18
Morgan Lewis. Recent NCAA Eligibility Rulings Highlight Expanding Judicial Role in College Athletics Governance
19
Ropes & Gray LLP. House v. NCAA Settlement Approved
20
NCAA. DI Board of Directors Directs Cabinet to Advance Age-Based Eligibility Rules
21
NCAA. DI Cabinet Modifies Age-Based Eligibility Concept
22
NCAA. Division I Cabinet Continues Discussions of Age-Based Collegiate Eligibility Model
23
ESPN. NCAA Panel Tweaks DI Eligibility Proposal, Vote Late June
24
Field Level Media. President Trump Executive Order: NCAA Athletes Get 5 Years, 1 Transfer