Judge denies Alberto Osuna’s bid for injunction as he attempts to play baseball for Tennessee
Judge denies Alberto Osuna’s bid for injunction as he attempts to play baseball for Tennessee
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Alberto Osuna’s bid to play baseball for defending College World Series champion Tennessee received a setback Monday when a federal judge denied his bid for a preliminary injunction.
Osuna sued the NCAA last month while making the case that a year he spent at Walters State Community College shouldn’t count against his eligibility.
U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley denied Osuna’s motion Monday.
“The Court is sympathetic to Plaintiff’s position,” Atchley said in his ruling. “For an organization that professes to prioritize the well-being of its student-athletes, the NCAA’s conduct has in many ways been questionable at best and self-interested at worst. Still, Plaintiff’s extraordinary talents cannot alone justify the extraordinary remedy he seeks.”
The Monday ruling followed a preliminary injunction hearing last week.
“Alberto is extremely disappointed with the decision,” Chad Hatmaker, a lawyer representing Osuna, said in a statement. “We are weighing our options before deciding on our next steps.”
Osuna played the 2021 season at Walters State before transferring to North Carolina, where he played for the last three seasons.
Because Osuna believed he had no more Division I eligibility left after spending last season at North Carolina, he transferred to Division II program Tampa. Then Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia won an injunction in court enabling him to play one more season next fall because a judge determined Pavia’s season at New Mexico Military Institute shouldn’t count against his Division I eligibility.
Noticing the similarities in his case and Pavia’s situation, Osuna entered the transfer portal and landed at Tennessee.
The argument made in Pavia’s case and now in Osuna’s case is that the NCAA bylaws violate the Sherman Act by restraining the free market. The idea is that by counting the time they spent at junior colleges against their Division I eligibility, it prevents them from profiting off the name, image and likeness opportunities they would have received by playing a full four years at a Division I program.
Atchley said in his ruling that the court was facing “an uncertain and clearly evolving legal landscape.”
“No binding precedent categorizes all NCAA eligibility rules as commercial in nature,” Atchley said. “Yet the NIL era, in many ways, blurs the lines between clearly commercial rules and those eligibility rules once thought to be explicitly non-commercial. Where are those lines drawn? It’s difficult to say. If the JUCO Rule is commercial because it affects student-athletes’ access to the NIL market, then wouldn’t the same be true for all eligibility rules?”
Osuna batted .259 with a .359 on-base percentage, 45 homers and 140 RBIs in 177 career games at North Carolina over the last three seasons. He hit .281 with a .376 on-base percentage, 14 homers and 56 RBIs in 62 games last season while helping the Tar Heels reach the College World Series.
Even without Osuna in the lineup, Tennessee has opened its title defense by winning its first 11 games.
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