The three-week stretch where Class of 2022 seniors could pencil in a fifth season just slammed shut, at least while the appeal runs its course.
On Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit granted the NCAA's motion to stay the preliminary injunction in Wisne v. NCAA, the class action that had handed a fifth year of eligibility to athletes who started college in 2022 and burned through four seasons by the end of last spring. Judges Timothy Tymkovich, Paul Kelly and Veronica Rossman signed the order.
The panel worked off the standard four-part test from Nken v. Holder: likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm without a stay, harm to the other side, and where the public interest lies. The NCAA cleared the bar on all four, in the panel's read. The injunction is frozen while the appeal plays out, and the court has set an expedited hearing.
Judge Charlotte Sweeney of the District of Colorado granted the class-wide injunction at the end of July, as we have previously covered. She ordered the NCAA to open a fifth year for the entire class of Division I athletes who began play in 2022-23 and finished four years of eligibility by the close of 2025-26. Sweeney then denied the NCAA's request to stay her own order, which is what sent the association up to the Tenth Circuit.
The suit was filed in July by 11 Division I athletes, led by Northern Colorado guard Brock Wisne and including Minnesota's Cade Tyson, who averaged 19.6 points a game last season. They challenged the NCAA's new age-based model, the one that starts an athlete's eligibility clock at first full-time enrollment or the fall following his 19th birthday, whichever comes first. Anyone who finished four years by the end of 2025-26 got nothing extra under that framework, and that was the fight.
No football players are named in the Wisne class, but this one belongs on every coach's radar. The ruling swept in every D-I sport, and plenty of fifth-year football hopefuls were counting on it. With the stay in place, any Class of 2022 player who exhausted four years is ineligible again unless he holds his own restraining order or injunction.
Louisiana is the reason the stay does not wipe the board completely clean. Two days before the Tenth Circuit ruled, a Louisiana federal judge granted a temporary restraining order to a separate group of 16 players, most of them already signed to NFL rosters and trying to come back to school. The list includes Buccaneers edge and former LSU standout Jack Pyburn, former James Madison linebacker Trent Hendrick, the 2025 Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year, and former Ole Miss starters Zxavian Harris, Dae'Quan Wright and Wydett Williams. Attorneys Ryan Downton and Mark Peper filed it as its own case, not as part of Wisne.
The separation matters. The Tenth Circuit stay freezes Judge Sweeney's order and nothing else. The Louisiana TRO sits in a different court, in a different circuit, on a different set of facts, so it keeps standing on its own. Those 16 players are still eligible this morning. The Colorado class, for now, is not.
If this all feels nearly impossible to track, you're far from alone.
The Louisiana order actually reaches further than Wisne did. It bars the NCAA from denying eligibility because a player signed a pro or agent contract or suited up in a pro game, as long as he terminates the deal and returns the money before he plays a college snap, and it cracked open a one-week transfer portal window for the group. So while the class-wide fifth year is on ice, the narrow path for a player who goes and gets his own order is wide open, and a Louisiana judge just showed how far one of those orders can stretch.
Roster management still comes with a warning. A TRO is temporary by design. It buys time until the next hearing and can be dissolved or appealed to the Fifth Circuit, so a player eligible under it today is not locked in for the season. And a Class of 2022 player you had penciled in on the strength of the Colorado ruling could be off your board until this appeal is decided.
The NCAA has called Sweeney's decision "egregiously wrong" and warned it would invite more chaos. The players get their swing at the expedited hearing. Recruits entering in 2027, worth keeping in mind, fall fully under the age-based rules no matter how this appeal lands.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.
Update >> The NCAA has released a statement that reads:
The Tenth Circuit’s decision to stay the preliminary injunction issued by a Colorado federal district court judge in Wisne permits Division I to return to the status quo before the district court intervened. Effective immediately, the age-based eligibility rules