The Eastland Court of Appeals has reversed a trial court order granting a Tarleton State University basketball player’s request for a temporary injunction blocking the NCAA from enforcing its five-year eligibility rule.
National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Freddy Hicks, III (No. 11-25-00382-CV; August 31, 2026) arose from a college athlete’s challenge to the NCAA’s five-year rule. Hicks, a basketball player at Tarleton State University, received an extra year of eligiblity because of the COVID-19 pandemic (the NCAA issued a blanket waiver of the eligibility requirements to all athletes for the 2020-21 season). Hicks played for TSU in 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons. He transferred to Arkansas State for the following season, but transferred back to TSU for the 2024-25 season. He suffered an injury that knocked him out of some but not all games. Hicks thus exhausted his eligibility. TSU sought a medical hardship waiver to allow Hicks to play nother year, but the NCAA denied it.
Hicks sued the NCAA in October 2025, asserting that the NCAA’s five-year rule violated the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act. He requested temporary and injunctive relief to block enforcement of the rule so that he could play the 2025-26 season (and get his NIL compensation of $60-70,000. He argued that his injury impaired his goal of playing in the NBA. His coach testified that he thought Hicks could get the opportunity to do that if could “reestablish his performance with another season of Division I basketball.” Following the hearing, an Erath County district court granted the TI on December 8, 2025. The NCAA sought interlocutory relief.
In an opinion by Justice Williams, the court of appeals reversed and remanded to the trial court. As a threshold matter, the court considered whether the dispute was moot. The court found that an actual controversy between the parties still existed “because the trial court’s order enjoins the NCAA from applying retroactive sanctions pursuant to the Restitution Rule.” That rule “authorizes the NCAA to impose retroactive sanctions against a member institution when an ineligible student-athlete competes under an injunction that is ‘later voluntarily vacated, stayed or reversed, or found by the courts to have been improperly granted.” As SCOTX held in a 1996 case involving a Texas Tech University football player, even after the season ended and that part of the case became moot, the ability of the NCAA to enforce the restitution rule against the player survived. The same applied here, since the NCAA continued to have a “concrete interest” in enforcement of the rule.
Moving on to the merits, the court first took up Hicks’s antitrust claim. The NCAA argued, among other things, that the Texas act didn’t apply and, alternatively, Hicks didn’t meet his evidentiary burden to define a relevant antitrust market or demonstrate that the rule has a substantial anticompetitive effect in that market. The court held that the act applied and that NCAA eligibility rules were subject to antitrust scrutiny. “The three federal circuit courts that have considered the question,” the court observed, “have concluded that eligibility rules are commercial in nature because they limit the ability to participate in the labor market” (citations omitted). Noting that federal courts have applied the “rule of reason” analysis to NCAA eligibility rules, the court proceeded on this basis. The “rule of reason analysis requires courts to conduct a fact-specific assessment of market power and market structure to assess the restrain’s effect on competition. [] This assessment involved a three-step burden shifting framework: (1) the plaintiff bears the initial burden of proving the challenged restraint has a substantial anticompetitive effect; (2) if the plaintiff succeeds, the burden shifts to the defendant to show a procompetitive rationale; and (3) if the defendant makes that showing, the burden shifts back to the plaintiff to demonstrate the procompetitive efficiencies could be achieved through less anticompetitive means.”
As part of Plaintiff’s burden under the first prong of the text, Plaintiff must define the relevant market. Hicks alleged that the relevant market was the Texas and nationwide labor markets for the servicews of NCAA Division I basketball players. But at the hearing Hicks didn’t submit any evidence supporting this definition. Such evidence might have included economic analysis or concrete market data, but all the trial court had to work with was a bare assertion. Hicks, the court concluded, “did not establish a probable right to relief on his antitrust claim, and the trial court erred in granting a temporary junction for this reason.” Even had Hicks defined the relevant market, his claim would still fail for lack of evidence that the eligibility rules had an anticompetitive effect. That evidence could have included “actual detrimental effects on competition,” such as reduced output, increased prices, or decreased quality in the relevant market. Or it might have entailed indirect evidence “of market power plus some evidence that the challenged restraint harms competition.” No such evidence was produced.
Consequently, the court reversed the trial court’s ruling, dissolved the temporary injunction, and remanded the case for further proceedings.
