Samari Collier spent his 2025 season as Coastal Carolina's dual-threat quarterback, throwing for 489 yards and 7 scores while adding 429 yards and 7 more touchdowns on the ground. By all accounts he was out of eligibility after that. Then he entered the transfer portal along with four other Chanticleers quarterbacks, and the NCAA's eligibility math said his career was over. A judge just said otherwise.
Pete Nakos broke the news that Collier had been granted a TRO against the NCAA, keeping his 2026 season alive.
This isn't happening in a vacuum. It's the latest domino in the fallout from Diego Pavia's fight with the NCAA, which kicked off when the Vanderbilt quarterback sued over the so-called JUCO Rule — the NCAA policy that counts junior college seasons against a player's four years of NCAA eligibility. A federal judge granted Pavia a preliminary injunction, ruling the rule likely violates antitrust law, and the NCAA responded with a blanket waiver for the 2025-26 season for players who'd competed at non-NCAA schools. That patch didn't cover everyone, and now guys like Collier, who played junior college ball at Hutchinson Community College before landing at Coastal Carolina, are individually suing to get their extra year.
Collier's path fits the pattern exactly. He helped Hutchinson to an NJCAA Division I national title and picked up Co-Offensive Player of the Year honors in the KJCCC before transferring up to the FBS level. Under the old rule, those juco years get baked into his eligibility clock regardless of what level he was playing at. Pavia's lawsuit argued that's an antitrust problem, not just an eligibility technicality — and enough judges have agreed that a wave of players are now getting individual TROs to buy time while the larger class-action fight plays out.
Why this matters beyond one quarterback: Collier is still sitting in the transfer portal, per Nakos's report, repped by APSportsAgency, which means a program can scoop him up right now without worrying his season gets yanked away mid-year by an NCAA appeal. That's a real roster and betting variable for whoever lands him, especially with fall camps bearing down. The NCAA has signaled it isn't thrilled about how far this could go — reporting elsewhere has the NCAA warning this line of litigation could theoretically stretch eligibility windows into something like 18 seasons of college football if left unchecked. That's the fight in the background every time one of these TROs gets granted.
For now, Collier gets to keep training and taking portal calls like his eligibility was never in question, which is exactly what a TRO is designed to do — freeze the status quo while the actual legal argument grinds through the courts. Whether he ends up starting somewhere in 2026 depends on which program is willing to bet on a player whose eligibility is still technically being litigated. But the bigger story is that this keeps happening, one player and one restraining order at a time, because the NCAA still hasn't fixed the rule that started all of it.