A second judge has now stepped into the fight over college football eligibility, and this time the SEC is in the crosshairs in Texas.
Dallas County Judge Martin Hoffman granted a 14-day temporary restraining order on Thursday to a group of more than 40 class of 2022 athletes, restoring their eligibility and allowing them to enter the transfer portal during that window. The ruling names the NCAA, the SEC and commissioner Greg Sankey as defendants, matching the kind of legal pressure that’s already building in Louisiana.
Among the plaintiffs are former Miami linebacker Wesley Bissainthe, former Washington receiver Omari Evans and former SMU receiver Jordan Hudson. Bissainthe and Evans are both currently rostered by the NFL Kansas City Chiefs. The Texas order, like the amended Baton Rouge TRO, also blocks the SEC’s punishment structure for schools that roster an athlete who declared for the NFL, NBA or WNBA draft without removing their name, signed a contract with one of those leagues, or appeared on a roster in one of them.
Those penalties are steep: a fine worth 50 percent of the school’s annual operating budget, a half-season suspension for the head coach and the loss of voting rights in SEC matters.
No player covered by the Texas TRO has yet committed to transfer to a new school or return to a previous one. That makes the Louisiana case, involving tight end Dae’Quan Wright and defensive tackle Zxavian Harris, the only one so far to produce a commitment from a freshly released NFL player back to college football. Both are commitments to LSU football coach Lane Kiffin as of this week.
Still, the Texas ruling may point to a wider wave ahead. Kiffin said last Monday that more decisions like Hoffman’s were coming.
“From my information, this isn’t stopping,” Kiffin said Monday. “There are cases that are going to come out where there are other athletes in the same type cases.
You may end up having hundreds of athletes in this case that are told they have a fifth year. So, this is really a unique circumstance that isn’t a traditional pros trying to go back to college because they win (an individual) case.”
The SEC isn’t the only league conference drawing this kind of challenge. The other Power Four conferences have also passed bylaws meant to keep schools from signing athletes who were ruled eligible after signing a pro contract. Those rules were designed as a backup plan, a second layer of protection if a judge sided with a player in one of the many lawsuits against the NCAA.
Now those conference rules are being targeted too, with attorneys and state judges testing whether the leagues can actually enforce them.
The key issue is authority: whether a conference is acting on its own or in concert with the NCAA. That question echoes the U.S.
Supreme Court’s ruling in Alston v. NCAA in 2021, when the court said the NCAA could not impose national limits on “education-related benefits,” but conferences could make their own rules.
That separation is at the center of these temporary restraining orders.
The NCAA has already taken plenty of losses in eligibility cases this summer and in recent years. The same could easily happen at the conference level if these challenges keep landing in court. But one unresolved question hangs over all of it: is giving class of 2022 athletes a fifth season of eligibility the same thing as saying a conference can’t enforce its own rules against member schools?
That answer will likely be fought over on appeal. And if the losing side pushes it all the way, this is not a dispute that’s likely to be settled before the 2026 college football season ends.
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