Whatever power the NCAA has left to enforce the remaining rules could be in serious trouble after a ruling last week in Alabama state court.
Judge Andrew J. Hairston of DeKalb County, Alabama, Circuit Court on Monday granted former Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt a preliminary injunction that for now prohibits the NCAA from enforcing a six-year penalty for “show cause.” The NCAA sanction effectively left Pruitt jobless in college athletics during that period.
Pruitt coached the Vols from 2018 to 2020, but was fired after the school discovered recruiting violations. In 2023, the NCAA infractions committee [COI] concluded that the program committed 18 Level I violations, mostly related to paying prospects and their families (when this was illegal).
The NCAA summarily ruled that Pruitt was directly involved, leading to his individual punishment in addition to the program receiving a 28-scholarship reduction and 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 punishments that still has teeth; essentially a banishment from college athletics that, at least in theory, deters coaches and administrators from violating various rules.
College sports, like any sports entity, need an effective rules enforcement process.
The significance of Pruitt's injunction is that it was not based on the merits of Pruitt's claim of innocence (which, if true, would limit the NCAA's reach to one case), but rather on the unfairness of a process that, Judge Hairston ruled, made it impossible for Pruitt to even mount a defense.
“Pruitt has a reasonable probability of demonstrating that, if given the opportunity for an objective and impartial investigative process, the IOC would have imposed a less restrictive punishment, if at all,” the order reads.
Hairston noted, for example, that the NCAA system does not allow for basic legal capabilities, such as the right to question witnesses or compel third parties to produce records.
Additionally, he wrote that the COI, in accepting Tennessee's guilty plea, failed to adequately consider Pruitt's case, which Hairston said includes an “overwhelming degree of contradictory and incomplete statements” from witnesses who could have helped him.
Tennessee also received financial incentives to hold Pruitt guilty because he allowed the “for cause” firing of a coach who went just 16-19 in three seasons. While the NCAA's $9 million fine was significant, it prevented the school from paying Pruitt $12.7 million in damages for a performance-based dismissal.
“So UT saved $3.7 million and the NCAA got $9 million,” said David Holt of the Huntsville, Ala., law firm Loftin Holt Hall & Hargett, which represented Pruitt.
That agreement set the tone, the court said, for how Pruitt could fight the charges.
“That the IOC accepted UT's version of events, denied Pruitt the opportunity to properly present and/or defend his case, and imposed disproportionate sanctions,” Hairston wrote. “…A reasonably-minded jury could conclude that the COI violations process was procedurally and substantially deficient.”
Pruitt and the NCAA were ordered to mediate, for now. The NCAA did not respond to a request for comment.
This is a single preliminary injunction in a single case in a single state, not federal, circuit court. The decision is open to appeal. However, veteran NCAA observers believe it could serve as a basis for anyone seeking to challenge any NCAA sanctions, including exhibition cases.
“This could become an existential threat to the law enforcement system,” said Arkansas-based attorney Tom Mars, who has a long history of cases involving college sports but was not involved in this one.
Mars said: “The rules on their face are inconsistent with the way justice is administered anywhere else in the United States.”
NCAA law enforcement was already struggling with sanctions written for a bygone era in the rapidly changing landscape of college athletics.
What were once fundamental sanctions, such as scholarship reductions, are largely moot and easy to fix in an era where direct revenue sharing or NIL agreements can allow a star player to simply pay his own tuition, for example.
The cause of spectacle was still effective in keeping rule-breaking coaches out of the college game. Now, perhaps even that is at risk because of the NCAA's own infraction structure.
“The system is not designed to get to the truth or give the defendant due process,” said Bartley Loftin III, another of Pruitt's attorneys.
Given the NCAA's dismal legal record of late, it's not hard to see how this could snowball.
After all, it was a single ruling from a federal court in West Virginia in 2023 that prohibited the NCAA from forcing transfers to sit out for a year, causing the transfer portal to spin and altering the way teams are built.
And it was a single ruling from a federal court in Tennessee in 2024 that prohibited the NCAA from punishing any athlete or booster for making a NIL deal during the recruiting process, leading to the current “pay-for-play” era. And then another in 2024 that prevented the NCAA from counting college seasons for eligibility, clearing the way for Vanderbilt's Diego Pavia, among others, to continue playing.
All of the above was once unthinkable.
“We've all seen the radical change that has occurred in the last five years,” Holt said. “[The enforcement process] It's the next domino to fall.”
Times keep changing; The NCAA could have been surprised again.
