Wetzel: Is this the last straw for NCAA enforcement?

Whatever remaining power the NCAA still has to enforce whatever rules are remaining might be in serious trouble after a ruling last week in an Alabama state court.

Judge Andrew J. Hairston of the circuit court of DeKalb County, Alabama, on Monday granted a preliminary injunction to former Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt that for now prohibits the NCAA’s enforcement of a six-year “show cause” penalty. The NCAA sanction effectively made Pruitt unemployable in college athletics for that time period.

Pruitt coached the Vols from 2018 to ’20, but he was fired after the school uncovered recruiting violations. In 2023, the NCAA’s committee on infractions [COI] concluded the program committed 18 Level I violations, mostly related to paying prospects and their families (back 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 reduction of 28 scholarships and a $9 million fine. Pruitt spent one year with the New York Giants before becoming a teacher and coach at Plainview High School in Alabama.

The show cause is one of the few NCAA punishments that still have teeth; essentially a banishment from college athletics that, at least theoretically, deters coaches and administrators from violating various rules.

College sports, like any sports entity, needs an effective rule enforcement process.

The significance of the Pruitt injunction is that it wasn’t based on the merits of Pruitt’s claim of innocence (which, if true, would limit the NCAA’s scope to one case) but rather the unfairness of a process that, Judge Hairston ruled, made it impossible for Pruitt to even mount a defense.

“Pruitt has a reasonable likelihood of proving that, had he been given the opportunity for an objective, impartial, fact-finding process, the COI would have imposed a less-restrictive punishment, if one at all,” the order reads.

Hairston noted, for example, that the NCAA system doesn’t allow for basic legal abilities, such as the right to cross-examine witnesses or compel records from third parties.

He additionally wrote that the COI, by accepting Tennessee’s admission of guilt, didn’t properly consider Pruitt’s case, which Hairston said includes an “overwhelming degree of conflicting and incomplete statements” from witnesses that could have helped him.

Tennessee was also financially incentivized to deem Pruitt guilty because it allowed a “for cause” firing of a coach who was just 16-19 in three seasons. While the NCAA’s $9 million fine was significant, it spared the school from paying Pruitt a $12.7 million buyout for a performance-based firing.

“So UT saved $3.7 million and the NCAA got $9 million,” said David Holt, of the Loftin Holt Hill & Hargett law firm out of Huntsville, Alabama, which represented Pruitt.

That deal set the tone, the court said, for how Pruitt could fight the charges.

“That the COI accepted UT’s version of the events, disallowed Pruitt the opportunity to adequately present and/or defend his case, and levied disproportionate penalties against Pruitt,” Hairston wrote. “… A reasonable-minded juror could conclude that the COI’s infractions process was procedurally and substantively deficient.”

Pruitt and the NCAA were ordered into mediation, 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 circuit court, not a federal one. The decision is open to appeal. Yet longtime NCAA observers believe it could serve as the groundwork for anyone looking to challenge any NCAA penalty, including show causes.

“This can become an existential threat to the enforcement system,” said Arkansas-based lawyer Tom Mars, who has a long history of trying college sports-related cases but wasn’t involved in this one.

Said Mars: “The rules on their face are inconsistent with how justice is administered everywhere else 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 bedrock sanctions such as scholarship reductions are largely moot and easily worked around in an era where direct revenue-sharing or NIL deals can allow for a star player to just pay his own tuition as a “walk-on,” for example.

The show cause was still effective at keeping rule-breaking coaches out of the college game. Now, perhaps, even that is at risk due to the NCAA’s own infractions structure.

“The system is not designed to reach the truth or give the accused due process,” said Brantley Loftin III, another of Pruitt’s attorneys.

Considering the NCAA’s abysmal legal record of late, it’s not hard to see how this might snowball.

It was, after all, a single federal court ruling out of West Virginia in 2023 that prohibited the NCAA from forcing transfers from sitting out a year, causing the transfer portal to spin and alter how teams are built.

And it was a single federal court ruling out of Tennessee in 2024 that prohibited the NCAA from punishing any athlete or booster from making a NIL deal during the recruiting process, leading to the current “pay for play” era. And then another in 2024 that stopped the NCAA from counting junior college seasons against eligibility, clearing the way for Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia, among others, to continue playing.

All of the above were once unthinkable developments.

“We’ve all seen the sea change that has been ongoing the last five years,” Holt said. “[The enforcement process] is the next domino set to fall.”

The times keep changing; the NCAA might have been caught flat-footed again.