The NCAA Has Asked Niagara County To Dissolve The Order That Makes Roddy Gayle Eligible

Roddy Gayle Jr. has until Monday to answer the NCAA.

That is the next date on this case, and it arrived because the NCAA took the date before it. On Wednesday, September 9, lawyers for the NCAA and its president filed a memorandum of law in opposition in Niagara County Supreme Court, Index No. E192685/2026. It runs 24 pages. Gayle's reply is due September 14. Justice Frank A. Sedita III hears the motion on Thursday, September 17, at 2 p.m., five days from today.

The filing asks for two things. Deny the preliminary injunction, and vacate the temporary restraining order entered September 2, the order that has made Gayle eligible for the past ten days. In the NCAA's phrasing, the order "should be dissolved now that the NCAA has appeared and opposes the motion." A restraining order granted on one side's papers is a different object once the other side shows up, and Thursday is when it stops being one.

The brief does not argue about basketball#

It is worth saying what is not in it. The NCAA does not argue that Gayle was a marginal player, or that Michigan does not want him. It says the opposite, in the second paragraph: he "should be applauded for his determination, his contributions to two Division I programs, and his role in Michigan's championship run."

Then it counts. Four consecutive seasons at two institutions, 146 games, 72 starts. Under the five-year rule in the bylaws that governed those four years, an athlete gets four seasons of competition inside a five-year window, and the brief's position is that Gayle used all four and the new age-based model does not reach backward to give him a fifth. It cites the effective-date language in the June proposal and the NCAA's own transition guidance, which says athletes who used their final season in 2025-26 receive no additional eligibility.

That is the whole eligibility argument, and it is the part everybody already knew. The rest of the brief is about New York.

Four New York obstacles, and one of them is from 1972#

Gayle's complaint does not plead antitrust. It pleads breach of contract as an intended third-party beneficiary of the NCAA bylaws, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, arbitrary and capricious action by an association, and declaratory relief, including under New York Education Law section 6438-c. That choice is why the Tenth Circuit's August 21 stay in the Colorado class case did not take his order away from him. It is also what the NCAA spent most of Wednesday's filing attacking.

The four arguments, in the order the brief makes them.

The relief is mandatory rather than preventive, so the standard is higher. An order declaring Gayle eligible does not preserve the status quo, the brief argues; it changes it, which in New York requires extraordinary circumstances and a clear right to relief.

Martin v. Curran bars the action. This is a New York rule about suing unincorporated associations, and the NCAA is one. The brief's reading is that a plaintiff must plead individual liability of the members, and that Gayle, who is not a member, cannot enforce the bylaws at all.

He is not a third-party beneficiary. Here the brief produces a case Gayle's own motion did not cite: Bounds v. Eastern College Athletic Conference, decided in Monroe County Supreme Court in 1972. A basketball player tried to enjoin a conference from ruling him ineligible. The court dismissed, holding he could derive no rights from an unincorporated association's constitution and bylaws because he was not a member of it. His right to play, the court said, came from being a student at his school. The NCAA's line is that the same is true now: whatever Gayle is owed, he is owed by Michigan, not by the association he never joined.

Education Law section 6438-c supplies no private right of action. The statute is in his complaint. The brief says it gives him no standing to sue under it.

There is a fifth argument the brief makes quietly, and it matters for how long this runs. The NCAA preserves an objection that Niagara County has no personal jurisdiction over it at all, notes that the jurisdictional facts are contested, and then asks the court to rule against Gayle on the merits without reaching the question. It concedes in the same paragraph that Gayle was certified through the NCAA Eligibility Center as a New York high-school athlete, that the NCAA has more than twenty member institutions in New York, and that it stages championships in New York venues.

A federal judge denied the same claim the same day, and it does not transfer#

On September 9, the day the NCAA filed against Gayle, Judge Robert C. Chambers of the Southern District of West Virginia issued a written opinion denying a preliminary injunction to fourteen athletes from Marshall and Ohio University. Same high-school class, same exclusion, same argument that the bylaws are a contract they can enforce. He had denied their restraining order on August 26, heard them on September 2, ruled from the bench, and explained himself a week later.

The reason he gave is the reason it does not settle Thursday. West Virginia Code section 55-8-12 lets a third-party beneficiary enforce a contract "only if it is made for its sole benefit." The court read the Division I Manual as a whole, found that it also confers benefits on institutions, conferences and athletics personnel, and concluded the athletes are not its sole beneficiaries. That is a state statute doing the work, and New York does not have it. New York asks a different question, whether a beneficiary is intended or merely incidental, and the NCAA's own brief argues that test by citing New York cases rather than West Virginia's.

So the running score in other courts is not evidence about this one. The NCAA's brief says three appellate courts have now stayed injunctions against it on these issues and that multiple trial courts have denied relief outright. That is the NCAA's count, made in its own filing. The most complete public docket of these cases, the College Sports Litigation Tracker, states plainly that state-court eligibility suits are tracked in good faith rather than completely, because state dockets are often unsearchable or paywalled. Nobody has a clean denominator here, and a piece that gives you one would be inventing it.

The zero-sum paragraph, and Michigan's fifteen#

The section of the brief with the most direct consequence for Michigan is the one about equities. The NCAA argues that letting an ineligible athlete compete is not costless, quoting this year's Supreme Court line that sports are "highly competitive and generally zero sum," and adding its own: "Roster spots are finite. So is playing time." Every game Gayle plays, the brief says, is development, playing time and name-image-likeness value taken from an athlete whose eligibility nobody disputes.

Michigan's published 2026-27 roster has fifteen players on it. Fifteen is the men's basketball roster limit under the House settlement. Gayle was not on it when it went up on September 4, two days after the restraining order, and he is not on it this morning. Michigan has now had a court order in hand for ten days and has added nobody.

What is actually at stake in the rotation#

Michigan's 2025-26 cumulative statistics are the cleanest way to say it. The team played 8,025 minutes across 40 games on the way to 37-3 and a national championship. Elliot Cadeau played 1,085 of them, 27.1 a night, with 234 assists. Trey McKenney played 885, 22.1 a night, and started none of the 40. Gayle played 823, 21.1 a night across 39 games, with one start, which is just over a tenth of Michigan's floor time.

Behind those two, the guards on Michigan's published roster have 12 minutes of Michigan basketball between them. All 12 are Howard Eisley Jr.'s, from nine appearances. Michigan announced on September 1 that freshman guard Brandon McCoy Jr. will miss this season after surgery on a torn knee ligament. The rest of the backcourt has not played a college game.

That is the hole, and it is why a court date in Niagara Falls is a rotation story. One caution on the size of it: 39 games at 21.1 minutes is a real sample, but Gayle shot 21 for 66 from three last season, 31.8 percent, and had 52 assists against 50 turnovers. Michigan would not be adding a solution. It would be adding the only guard on the property who has done the job before.

The calendar#

The hearing sits 24 days before the first exhibition and 46 days before the opener. Thursday does not have to produce a ruling from the bench, and in the West Virginia case it took a further week for the reasoning to arrive. But the order Gayle is living under expires at that hearing by its own terms, and the NCAA has now asked, on the record, for it not to be replaced.

Sources: Defendants' Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Plaintiff's Order to Show Cause, Gayle v. NCAA, Index No. E192685/2026, Niagara County Supreme Court, filed September 9, 2026; Memorandum Opinion and Order denying preliminary injunction, Trotter v. NCAA, No. 3:26-cv-00523, S.D. W. Va., filed September 9, 2026; the College Sports Litigation Tracker for both dockets, the September 14 reply deadline and its note on state-court coverage; Michigan Athletics' official 2026-27 roster and schedule pages and its 2025-26 cumulative statistics, all read September 12, 2026; Michigan Athletics' September 1 release on Brandon McCoy Jr. and its September 4 non-conference schedule release.