College football just got a preview of what happens when the courts start writing the NCAA's rulebook for it. A federal judge in Colorado handed down a class-wide preliminary injunction that restores a fifth season of eligibility to Division I athletes from the 2022 recruiting class who ran out of eligibility this spring, and it immediately sent shockwaves through rosters everywhere. The catch: it's not one clean ruling applying to everybody. It's three separate legal fights in three different states, moving at three different speeds, and producing three different answers to the same question.
Former Georgia safety JaCorey Thomas is the face of the confusion right now. He posted 45 tackles for the Bulldogs in 2025 and had already moved on to pro ball, landing an invite to the Carolina Panthers' rookie minicamp. Now, according to his rep, he's exploring a return to college football off the back of the Colorado decision.
Here's where it gets messy. The Colorado case is a class action, and per Pete Nakos, it doesn't actually let those players enter the transfer portal at all -- it just restores their eligibility to keep playing, presumably back where they already are, if there's a spot for them. Meanwhile, separate lawsuits out of Ohio and Tennessee produced individual injunctions for named plaintiffs, and those specific players ARE cleared to hit the portal. Same fight, different courtroom, completely different outcome.
Full breakdown on this re: transfer portal The Colorado lawsuit does not allow players to enter the portal. However, this does not impact the recent lawsuit wins in Ohio and Tennessee, where named plaintiffs are going to be allowed to enter the portal. It's confusing and messy. https://t.co/JUS1AF87Hb
That distinction matters enormously for someone like Thomas. If he wasn't a named plaintiff in one of the state suits and didn't already enter his name in the portal back in January, he's not walking into a new transfer window just because a judge in Denver ruled in his favor. Nakos laid out the roadblock plainly: players chasing a return through this Colorado ruling can't transfer unless they were already in the portal earlier this year.
Any players who are exploring a return to college football will not be able to transfer unless they entered their name in January.
Even for the players who clear that bar, there's a second problem nobody's solved yet -- what happens if their old school doesn't have a roster spot for them anymore. The NCAA's so-called ghost transfer rules, which govern what happens to a player's status when they try to come back to a program that's moved on without them, are still fully in effect. That leaves guys like Thomas in a real bind: eligible to play, technically allowed back on some teams, but with nowhere guaranteed to land.
The NCAA, for its part, isn't taking any of this lying down -- the organization is expected to appeal the Colorado injunction, and its top brass has already blasted the ruling as overreach while pushing Congress for federal cover. Until that appeal plays out, though, college football is stuck operating under a patchwork of state-by-state court decisions that contradict each other on the most basic question in the sport right now: who's actually allowed to play where.