Cole Hutson played 48 games and made 23 starts in the trenches for Texas, went undrafted, and got a rookie minicamp look from the Cowboys. His pro career stalled out before it started. So he did what a growing number of former college athletes are doing in 2026: he sued the NCAA to get back on the field.
Pete Nakos broke the news that a judge sided with Hutson and granted the temporary restraining order.
Former Texas OL Cole Hutson's TRO against the NCAA has been granted, a source tells @On3. @BobbyBurtonOTF first. https://t.co/GYz7uBN9qB
The fight is over the NCAA's new five-for-five eligibility model, which lets athletes who graduated high school after 2022 play 5 seasons without burning a redshirt. Great deal, if you qualify. Hutson doesn't — he's part of the 2022 recruiting class, the exact group the rule leaves stranded on the wrong side of the cutoff. His argument, made in Travis County court, is that the line is arbitrary and unfair to guys who came in a year too early to catch the new rules. The judge apparently agreed enough to grant the TRO, clearing Hutson to resume football activities while the case plays out.
This isn't happening in a vacuum, either. Former Texas basketball players Jordan Pope and Chendall Weaver have filed similar suits, and a group of 24 men's and women's basketball players just won a preliminary injunction in Ohio challenging the same age-based framework. The NCAA is suddenly playing whack-a-mole in courtrooms across the country, and every loss chips away at a rule the association clearly still believes in.
The NCAA fired back at On3 with a statement defending the age-based model and pointing the finger at Congress.
Statement from NCAA to @On3 on Hutson ruling: “The new age-based eligibility model is a clear, common-sense rule that will protect opportunities for future generations of students to access the life-changing benefits of college sports participation, while also ensuring college sports are played by college students. We intend to defend the rules made by NCAA members exercising their collective judgement about what is best for college sports. Continued attempts by some to get more than the rules provided makes clear that working with Congress is the only way to bring stability to college sports.”
Reading between the lines of that statement, the NCAA isn't just defending Hutson's case specifically — it's defending the entire concept of a bright-line age rule against a wave of lawsuits threatening to blow it up piecemeal in state courts. Calling on Congress to "bring stability" is the NCAA's now-familiar move: when you can't win consistently in front of judges, ask lawmakers to legislate the chaos away.
For Texas, this is a real football question, not just a legal curiosity. Head coach Steve Sarkisian has already had to address the lawsuit publicly, and if Hutson's TRO holds up through the injunction hearing, the Longhorns could realistically get an experienced starting lineman back on the roster for a program that just reloaded up front. Multiply that scenario across every other 2022-class athlete watching this case, and it's easy to see why the NCAA is treating a former backup lineman's lawsuit like an existential threat instead of a one-off.