The Southeastern Conference’s bid to put the brakes on Louisiana’s eligibility fight hit a wall on September 14, when the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal refused to pause the preliminary injunction at the center of the dispute.
In a short order, the three-judge panel turned away both the SEC’s request for a stay and its application for supervisory writs. The court made the ruling in case No. 2026 CW 1195, with Judges Penzato, Lanier and Fields on the panel.
“STAY DENIED; WRIT DENIED.”
The appellate court leaned on Article 3612 of the Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure, which says a preliminary injunction does not automatically stop while an appeal is pending. Any decision to suspend that injunction, or to halt further proceedings in the district court, is left to the court’s discretion.
“The relators have not shown an abuse of that discretion by the district court,” the appellate court wrote.
For now, that means District Judge Will Jorden’s injunction stays in place and the state-court case keeps moving. The ruling is not the final word on the lawsuit, and it does not close the door on more review. But it does deny the SEC the immediate relief it was chasing.
That injunction came after a September 3 hearing in Baton Rouge, where Jorden blocked the NCAA and SEC from stopping LSU from putting Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris on its football roster while their eligibility claims played out. Wright and Harris had both briefly signed NFL contracts before asking for another college season.
The SEC answered with a policy that barred member schools from rostering athletes who had signed certain professional contracts. The conference also outlined possible penalties, including a half-season suspension for a head coach, loss of conference voting privileges and a fine of up to 50 percent of the affected sport’s operating budget.
Commissioner Greg Sankey initially said the SEC would follow the Louisiana court order. But that didn’t settle the bigger issue: whether the conference could still punish LSU for complying with a state-court injunction.
The dispute then spilled into federal court. The SEC sued LSU, LSU President Wade Rousse, Athletic Director Verge Ausberry and football coach Lane Kiffin in Alabama, later adding Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill as a defendant. The conference accused LSU and Kiffin of taking part in an “orchestrated campaign” to bring players back from NFL training camps through litigation.
Still, the SEC’s publicly filed complaint did not point to a specific LSU communication, witness or firsthand document showing LSU launched the athletes’ lawsuit.
The conference also pushed its federal case far enough to seek protection for what it says is its authority to expel LSU from the league. Murrill called that lawsuit a “collateral attack” on the Louisiana injunction during an appearance on Tiger Rag Radio.
LSU later filled its 105-player football roster without Wright and Harris, which ended their chance to play for the Tigers this season. That took the immediate roster issue off the table, but it did not erase the broader legal fight in Louisiana or the SEC’s federal claims.
The federal hearing was later postponed, and SEC presidents and chancellors never held the expected vote on LSU’s membership.
The First Circuit’s ruling adds another twist to a fight that still has no clean resolution: the Louisiana injunction remains in effect, and the SEC still does not have a Louisiana appellate order suspending it or a federal ruling backing its eligibility policy, its threatened sanctions or its claimed power to remove LSU.
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