Two weeks ago, this site wrote about two Class of 2022 players whose college careers looked finished on paper and alive in court. Bryson Ogletree, the North Carolina A&T guard who started his path at a Texas junior college, and Michael Eley, Hampton’s leading scorer, were both plaintiffs in a lawsuit asking for a fifth season in 2026-27. The momentum was entirely in their direction, with seven courts in a month blocking the NCAA’s enforcement of the old rules against their graduating class. Basketball was not the only sport affected. Southern’s Ckelby Givens, two Jackson State defensive starters, and Delaware State’s newest quarterback were all navigating the same shifting ground, though not all of them the same way.

On Friday, the direction reversed. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to stay the nationwide injunction in Wisne v. NCAA, the federal case out of Colorado that had covered Division I athletes in every sport regardless of where they lived or which team they played for. The NCAA posted a statement within hours: “Effective immediately, the age-based eligibility rules will be implemented as the Division I membership intended. Class members who were allowed to compete because of the Wisne injunction are no longer eligible to compete.”

The ruling in plain terms

U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney granted the Wisne injunction on July 31, restoring a fifth season to any member of the high school Class of 2022 who had exhausted four seasons under the NCAA’s old rules. The NCAA asked the Tenth Circuit to pause that order while its appeal plays out, and on Friday a two-judge majority agreed, finding the NCAA had met all four legal tests for a stay: a likely win on appeal, irreparable harm without one, a favorable balance of harm to the other side, and the public interest.

The practical result is what one sports attorney described as a two-tier system. Athletes who have their own injunction from a different court, one that the Tenth Circuit’s ruling does not touch, can keep competing. Athletes who were eligible only because they fell inside the Wisne class are, per the NCAA’s own reading, no longer eligible as of Friday. The NCAA’s statement did include one piece of relief for schools: institutions will not be cited for rules violations for rostering a class member who competed while the Wisne injunction was in force, before the stay was granted.

What changed for A&T and Hampton specifically

Ogletree, Eley, and North Carolina Central transfer Po’Boigh King were never solely dependent on Wisne. All three are also plaintiffs in Okpara v. NCAA, the North Carolina case filed in Guilford County, the Aggies’ home county, alongside more than 50 other athletes including former NC State players Darrion Williams, Tre Holloman, and Ven-Allen Lubin. That was supposed to be their backup path if Wisne ever wobbled.

It has wobbled, and the backup path has not held up the way the Guilford County filing suggested it might. The NCAA successfully petitioned to move the case to North Carolina’s business court, where it was assigned to Judge Matthew T. Houston, who has sided with the NCAA in previous eligibility cases, according to WRAL. The plaintiffs now plan to refile the case in other jurisdictions rather than continue before that judge. In other words, the North Carolina case that was supposed to protect Ogletree and Eley independent of Wisne currently offers them no injunction of its own. They were exactly the athletes relying solely on Wisne, and Wisne is now paused.

Ogletree already made his move

Recently, Ogletree announced on social media roughly a week ago that he is committed to Prairie View A&M, trading a CAA program for a SWAC one, HBCU to HBCU, inside the special transfer window that opened after the Wisne ruling. That window existed specifically so reinstated Class of 2022 players could move without the NCAA’s transfer restrictions applying. Prairie View’s official roster has not yet been updated to add him, which is normal lag for a mid-August commitment, but the North Carolina A&T page confirms he is off their roster.

His eligibility for 2026-27 traced back to the Wisne case. With Wisne staying and Okpara offering no injunction of its own at this time, Prairie View is in the position of holding a commitment from a player whose competitive status is genuinely unsettled, through no fault of the coaching staff who recruited him.

Eley is still waiting in Hampton

Eley has not made the same move. He remains listed on Hampton’s roster, still shown at 6-foot-4, still carrying the biography that credits him with leading the Pirates in scoring at 13 points per game last season despite missing nine games to injury. Hampton was picked in the top half of the CAA before this past season, and a healthy, eligible Eley for a fifth year changes that outlook considerably. Right now, whether he gets that fifth year rests on the same unresolved question as Ogletree’s: a home-state case that has stalled, and a nationwide injunction that a federal appeals court just paused.

The football side: Southern and Jackson State

Southern’s Ckelby Givens is the football version of Ogletree and Eley, and his timing is almost cruel. Givens, a four-year starting defensive end, the 2024 SWAC Defensive Player of the Year, and a two-time All-American, announced his return to Southern for a fifth season earlier this week, just days before the Tenth Circuit stayed the ruling that made that season possible. He sat out the offseason program and is now working back into shape under defensive line coach Kyle Kramer, who said plainly that Givens still has to earn his starting job back. That competition for a roster spot is now happening under the same cloud hanging over Ogletree and Eley.

Jackson State built part of its 2026 defense around the same eligibility. Safety B.J. Washington, who came up through Northwest Mississippi Community College, and defensive lineman Kazarius Bowie, who came up through Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, are both listed on the Tigers’ 2026 roster as fifth-year players. Both are exactly the kind of junior college transfer the Georgia court in Godfrey singled out by name, athletes whose NCAA seasons were counted using junior college years that were never inside the NCAA to begin with. Neither is a named plaintiff in one of the state cases still standing, which means their fifth season, like Ogletree’s and Eley’s, currently traces back to Wisne alone.

What still stands

Not every Class of 2022 protection fell on Friday. The Georgia case, Godfrey v. NCAA, is still in effect. The NCAA filed its own notice of appeal in that case on August 18, but no Georgia court has stayed the underlying injunction, and the Cobb County trial remains set for January 2027. Ohio’s case, Borovicanin v. NCAA, has followed a similar path to Wisne: the Ohio Court of Appeals has already stayed that injunction pending its own appeal, which the NCAA’s Friday statement referenced directly, saying it was “encouraged” by that outcome. Tennessee, New Jersey, Texas, and Oklahoma cases remain active as of this writing, each with its own timeline.

The map is uneven. A Class of 2022 player’s eligibility this fall depends less on the strength of the underlying legal argument, which every court so far has found persuasive at least preliminarily, and more on which specific court has jurisdiction over that specific player. Ogletree, Eley, Washington, and Bowie do not currently have a standalone state order, unlike plaintiffs in Georgia or Ohio.

Delaware State’s quarterback room is a look at how that kind of standalone order has played out elsewhere. Samari Collier, a former Illinois signee who won a junior college national championship at Hutchinson Community College before playing at Coastal Carolina in 2025, was granted his own temporary restraining order against the NCAA on July 28, three days before Wisne was even decided. That individual order, not the nationwide class, is what let him commit to Delaware State this month for a four-way competition to start under coach DeSean Jackson. Because his eligibility rests on a case of his own rather than on Wisne, Friday’s stay does not touch it.

What happens next

The Tenth Circuit’s stay is not a final ruling on the merits. It pauses the Wisne injunction while the underlying appeal proceeds, and the NCAA has been clear it wants that appeal decided permanently in its favor. For Ogletree, Eley, Washington, and Bowie, the July 31 deadline for filing hardship or season-of-competition waivers under the old rules has already passed, so that door is closed. The realistic paths left are a new state court order in North Carolina or Mississippi, inclusion in one of the other active cases, or an individual filing like the one that already secured Collier’s season at Delaware State.

None of that is under Prairie View’s, Hampton’s, Southern’s, Jackson State’s, or Delaware State’s control, and none of the five programs did anything wrong by planning around eligibility that federal and state courts had, as of two weeks ago, unanimously affirmed or, in Collier’s case, individually granted. Givens is already back on the practice field competing for his old job. Washington and Bowie are already penciled into a Jackson State defense. The players who benefit from these rulings are disproportionately the veterans HBCU programs depend on, which is exactly why the whiplash matters here more than it does at a program with a deeper bench. Data Driven HBCU will follow the Okpara refiling and each of these rosters as they develop.