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Dan Wetzel
Whatever rules the NCAA still has left to enforce may be in serious jeopardy after a ruling last week in an Alabama state court.
Judge Andrew J. of the Circuit Court of DeKalb County, Alabama. Hairston on Monday granted a preliminary injunction against former Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt, which currently prohibits the NCAA from imposing a six-year “show cause” penalty. The NCAA sanction made Pruitt effectively unemployed in college athletics for that time period.
Pruitt coached the Vols from 2018 to ’20, but he was fired after recruiting violations were revealed by the school. In 2023, the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions [COI] It concluded that the program committed 18 Level I violations, mostly related to paying customers and their families (when it was illegal).
The NCAA summarily ruled that Pruitt was directly involved, leading to his personal punishment in addition to the program having 28 scholarships cut and receiving a $9 million fine. Pruitt spent a year with the New York Giants before becoming a teacher and coach at Plainview High School in Alabama.
Show cause is one of the few NCAA penalties that still holds power; Essentially banishment from college athletics, which, at least theoretically, prevents coaches and administrators from violating various rules.
Like any sporting entity, college sports require an effective rule enforcement process.
The significance of the Pruitt injunction is that it was based not on the merits of Pruitt’s claim of innocence (which, if true, would limit the NCAA’s scope to one case) but rather on the unfairness of a process, Judge Hairston ruled, that made it impossible for Pruitt to even mount a defense.
“Pruitt has a reasonable prospect of proving that, had he been afforded the opportunity for an objective, impartial, fact-finding process, the COI would have imposed a less restrictive sentence, if at all,” the order said.
For example, Hairston said the NCAA system does not allow basic legal capabilities, such as the right to cross-examine witnesses or subpoena records from third parties.
He additionally wrote that the COI, while acknowledging Tennessee’s guilt, did not properly consider Pruitt’s case, which Hairston said included “enormous levels of contradictory and incomplete statements” from witnesses who could have helped him.
Tennessee was also financially incentivized to plead guilty to Pruitt because it allowed it to fire “for cause” a coach who was just 16–19 years old over three seasons. While the NCAA’s $9 million fine was significant, it saved the school from having to pay Pruitt $12.7 million for his performance-based firing.
“So UT saved $3.7 million and the NCAA got $9 million,” said David Holt of the Loftin Holt Hall & Hargett law firm of Huntsville, Alabama, which represented Pruitt.
That deal dictated how Pruitt could fight the charges, the court said.
“The COI accepted UT’s version of events, did not give Pruitt the opportunity to adequately present and/or defend his case, and imposed a disproportionate penalty against Pruitt,” Hairston wrote. “…a reasonable-thinking juror could conclude that the COI violation process was procedurally and substantively inadequate.”
For now, Pruitt and the NCAA were ordered to mediate. The NCAA did not respond to a request for comment.
This is a single preliminary injunction in a single case in a single state circuit court, not federal. The decision is open to appeal. Yet longtime NCAA observers believe it could serve as the basis for anyone challenging any NCAA penalty, including show cause.
“This could pose a potential threat to the enforcement system,” said Tom Mars, an Arkansas-based attorney who has a long history of litigating college sports-related cases but was not involved in this case.
Mars said: “The rules before him are inconsistent with how justice is administered everywhere in the United States.”
NCAA enforcement was already struggling with penalties written for a bygone era in the rapidly changing landscape of college athletics.
What were once restrictions, such as scholarship cuts, are largely moot and can be easily worked around in an era where direct revenue-sharing or void deals can allow a star player to have his tuition paid as a “walk-on”, for example.
Show cause was still in effect to keep coaches who break the rules out of college sports. Now, perhaps, he too is in danger because of the NCAA’s own violations structure.
Bartley Loftin III, another lawyer for Pruitt, said, “The system is not designed to get to the truth or give the accused due process.”
Given the NCAA’s dismal legal record recently, it’s not hard to see how this could snowball.
After all, there was a single federal court ruling in West Virginia in 2023 that barred the NCAA from forcing transfers to sit out a year, which spun up the transfer portal and changed the way teams are built.
And it was Tennessee’s single federal court ruling in 2024 that barred the NCAA from punishing any athlete or booster for making a void deal during the recruiting process, ushering in the current “pay for play” era. And then another incident in 2024 that prevented the NCAA from counting junior college seasons against eligibility, clearing the way for others, including Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia, to continue playing.
All of the above were once unimaginable developments.
,We’ve all seen the huge changes that have been going on over the last five years,, Holt said. ,[The enforcement process] “Is the next domino going to fall.”
Times keep changing; The NCAA may be in trouble again.
