Indiana safety sues NCAA to play this season

Indianapolis Star

3 days ago

BLOOMINGTON — Indiana football safety Louis Moore has filed a lawsuit in Dallas County District Court against the NCAA seeking additional eligibility as a former JUCO player.
Moore also filed an application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) that would allow him to stay with the team once the academic term begins on August 25, 2025. He's being represented by Brian P. Lauten, a Dallas-based attorney who specializes in business and commercial litigation.
Lauten told The Herald-Times on Saturday that he's expecting the court to schedule a hearing over Moore's TRO application on Monday or Tuesday.
Moore has been a full participant throughout IU's offseason going back to the spring and was practicing with the team as recently as Friday morning, but his status for the start of the season is in doubt absent an injunction.
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The NCAA denied his initial waiver request for an additional year of eligibility in June and the organization has yet to rule on an appeal the university filed last month.
Moore originally signed with the Hoosiers in 2022 after attending Navarro (Texas) College from 2019-21 (the 2020 season was canceled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic).
He transferred back to IU after spending last season at Ole Miss.
While the NCAA typically allows athletes to compete in sports for four seasons within five calendar years, including time spent at junior college, there's been a recent series of lawsuits challenging those eligibility rules from former JUCO players.
Most notably, a federal judge granted Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia an injunction for the 2025 season in December with his attorneys arguing the NCAA's eligibility rules were a violation of antitrust law.
Moore entered the transfer portal after the NCAA Division I Board of Directors approved a blanket waiver in the wake of the Pavia case that granted athletes an extra year of eligibility in 2025-26 who "competed at a non-NCAA school for one or more years."
According the filing, Moore and Indiana believed he would be eligible for the 2025 season under that updated guidance.
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'The way the NCAA is discriminately applying that eligibility by-law to junior college play is wrong," Lauten said. "This isn't novel, a half dozen federal courts have already found this exact same situation violates antitrust laws.'
Moore's attorneys made a similar argument that Pavia did, but at the state level — the Texas Antitrust Act has nearly identical ruling to the federal statute — in a filing submitted in Dallas County on Friday afternoon.
'The effect of the Five-Year Rule is to discourage student-athletes from attending junior college to prepare for four-year college and to punish those who do so, even though junior colleges provide student-athletes with necessary academic and other opportunities,' the filing states. 'Just as the student-athletes are deprived of the beneficial junior college experience, the junior colleges are deprived of elite athletes, reducing their ability to compete with NCAA schools.'
According to the filing, Moore would lose out on a 'one-in-a-lifetime' name, image, and likeness contract worth $400,000, and miss an opportunity to 'enhance his career and reputation by playing another year of Division I football at an NCAA major conference university that likely extend beyond the direct financial returns.'
He's also seeking compensatory damages and attorneys' fees.
'There shouldn't be one set of rules for quarterbacks at Vanderbilt and a different set of rules for defensive backs at Indiana,' Lauten said. 'The rules need to be applied consistently, and that should be the case whether you win a case in federal court. They haven't changed the rule, and that's not fair.'