THE NCAA asked a Florida appeals court Wednesday night to overturn a judge’s ruling supporting a basketball player who challenged the denial of an extra year of eligibility to play at Bethune-Cookman University.
THE NCAA addressed the 5th District Court of Appeal after Volusia County Circuit Judge Dennis Craig on Jan. 9 issued a temporary injunction in favor of the player, Dr. Bradley, who argued that college sports’ governing body violated a state antitrust law by refusing to let him play this season.
The legal battle comes amid massive changes — and questions — in college sports over issues such as transferring players between schools and compensation. Both sides in the Bradley dispute have stressed the potentially far-reaching implications of the case.
The NCAA brief released Wednesday said a rule that generally grants athletes four years of eligibility over a five-year period “was adopted by NCAA member institutions to preserve the distinctive nature of college athletics, ensure enrollment rotation so that new student-athletes have access to competition, and align athletic participation with academic progress.”
“(Allowing) judicial interference in NCAA eligibility determinations serves no purpose other than to invite litigation, diverting resources from the NCAA’s core mission and burdening the courts with institutional governance conflicts,” says the brief filed by attorneys James McKee and Kevin Fowler of the law firm Foley & Lardner.
But the Fort Lauderdale-based law firm Heitner Legal, which represents Bradley, said on its website that Craig’s injunction ruling was a “significant victory for the rights of college athletes.”
“The Bradley case represents more than one athlete’s fight for eligibility,” the company said on its website. “It is a challenge to the NCAA’s monopolistic control of college sports and its procedural framework that denies athletes basic fairness protections. Judge Craig’s decision provides both a legal road map and a moral imperative for reform.”
The NCAA brief says Bethune-Cookman submitted a waiver request in May for Bradley to receive another year of eligibility. The request came after a series of college stints that began in 2019 at California State University, Fullerton. He then enrolled at Salt Lake Community College, New Mexico State University, Nicholls State University and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where he played during the 2024-2025 season, according to the filing.
Several issues impacting player’s ‘eligibility clock,’ NCAA says
Bradley redshirted during the 2019-20 season at the California school, a move that effectively preserved a year of eligibility. Bradley, while still at the California school, also received an eligibility waiver for the 2020-2021 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which, according to the NCAA brief, “had the effect of extending his five-year eligibility clock into a six-year eligibility clock.”
One of the issues in this case is that Bradley ended up sitting out the 2023-24 season at Nicholls State while fighting criminal charges related to his time during the previous season at New Mexico State, according to the brief and information posted on the Heitner Legal website.
All told, the NCAA argued in its Wednesday brief that Bradley was seeking to extend his “eligibility window” to a seventh year. Bradley filed the suit in November in Volusia County after the NCAA denied the waiver request.
In granting the temporary injunction, Craig wrote that Bradley “is likely to succeed on the merits of his antitrust claim to the extent that Defendant (the NCAA) is the sole arbiter in determining who is eligible to compete in college sports, for which, as Defendant contends, athletes have no other recourse.”
But the NCAA The brief filed with the appeals court argued that Craig improperly applied antitrust law.
“In short, there is no competent and substantial evidence in the record – nor any ‘clear and definitive’ factual finding – to establish that the five-year (eligibility) rule produces substantial anticompetitive effects in any market,” the NCAA lawyers wrote. “At most, the record shows that Bradley is unhappy with the five-year rule as it applied to his waiver request. Indeed, he does not purport to challenge the five-year rule itself, but rather he convinced the trial court to guess how the NCAA rules should have applied to his situation.”
The Bethune-Cookman basketball website shows Bradley has played in four games since Jan. 10.
