Judge grants four West Virginia athletes a fifth season

A federal judge in West Virginia handed four Mountaineer athletes a fifth season of eligibility on Wednesday, the latest individual verdict in a fight over college sports' new five-year eligibility rule that keeps getting settled one courtroom at a time.

U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey ruled that basketball forwards Brenen Lorient and Javan Buchanan, football defensive back Jason Chambers and baseball pitcher Ben McDougal can play for West Virginia University in 2026-27 without the NCAA treating it as a violation of its eligibility rules.

Bailey's preliminary injunction, issued less than a week after a September 24 hearing, does more than clear the four to suit up. It also blocks the NCAA from enforcing its Rule of Restitution against West Virginia, the mechanism that lets the NCAA's board retroactively punish a school if an eligibility win gets reversed later.

The rule lets the NCAA strip victories, ban teams from the postseason or claw back television money. Courts around the country have grown wary of it in recent rulings, reasoning that the threat alone pressures athletic departments into abandoning athletes who sue.

Bailey made clear he disliked the assignment. He called the current state of eligibility law "a mess" and said Congress, not federal judges ruling case by case, should set one uniform standard. It is the third time in four years he has ruled for a West Virginia athlete in an eligibility fight, following cases for basketball player RaeQuan Battle in 2023 and a group of football players in 2025.

Left out of the new rule

The NCAA adopted an age-based, five-year eligibility model in June 2026, letting most athletes compete in five seasons within a five-year window that starts the year they turn 19 or first enroll in college.

Athletes who enrolled in 2022 and used all four seasons without ever redshirting aged out before that model applied to them, while players one class behind them now get five.

That gap, repeated at nearly every Division I school, is why lawsuits over the 2022 class have piled up in federal and state courts over the past three months.

Lorient, a 6-foot-9 forward, started all 34 games for West Virginia last season and averaged nearly 12 points and around six rebounds, stringing together 15 straight games in double figures after transfer stops at Florida Atlantic and North Texas.

Buchanan, a 6-7 forward, has not yet played for the Mountaineers but practiced fully with the team while his case was pending. He averaged 12.6 points and five rebounds at Boise State last season.

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Coach Ross Hodge said letting both forwards practice without restriction, rather than pulling them on and off the floor over eligibility uncertainty, let him fold them into the rotation early. "The fact that they've been able to be kind of full participants and have no restrictions, in that regard, it at least allows you to integrate them into what's happening," Hodge said.

Chambers started all 12 games at cornerback last season, playing 664 defensive snaps with 34 tackles, four pass breakups and an interception, and drew an NFL rookie minicamp invite this spring before deciding to return for a fifth year. Coach Rich Rodriguez called him a player who "could certainly help us if that gets through."

McDougal, a left-handed reliever, posted a 3.14 ERA with 13 strikeouts in 14 1/3 innings this spring, then kept pitching out of the bullpen as West Virginia advanced to the College World Series.

A ruling that kept shifting nationally

West Virginia's four athletes are swimming in a current that reversed itself twice over the summer. A federal judge in Colorado, Charlotte Sweeney, granted a class-wide preliminary injunction on July 31 covering every Division I athlete nationally who began competing in 2022-23 and used four seasons of eligibility, finding they were likely to win their antitrust claim against the NCAA.

For three weeks, the entire 2022 class appeared reinstated at once. Then, on August 21, a divided panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Sweeney's order by a 2-1 vote, with Judge Veronica Rossman dissenting.

The majority found the NCAA had shown it was likely to win on appeal and would suffer irreparable harm if the rule stayed blocked. The NCAA argued schools had already built 2026 rosters assuming the 2022 class was finished playing, and that thousands of younger athletes picked their schools expecting not to compete against them.

The stay knocked out the shortcut. Athletes have been filing one by one ever since, in whatever court covers their school.

Florida guard Denzel Aberdeen won his own fifth season on September 29, when an Alachua County, Florida circuit judge cleared him a day ahead of West Virginia's ruling. His attorneys pointed to more than 30 courts nationally that have ruled against the NCAA's cutoff for the 2022 class.

The NCAA itself has tallied 79 lawsuits involving 450 plaintiffs across every sport over the eligibility question.

What still isn't settled

None of it is final. The NCAA retains the right to appeal Bailey's ruling, as it has elsewhere, and winning in court does not obligate a school to actually play a returning athlete.

Rulings still differ by jurisdiction, meaning two players with nearly identical timelines can land on opposite sides of the eligibility line depending only on which courthouse heard their case. NCAA leadership has pushed Congress for one federal eligibility standard rather than leaving the question to dozens of overlapping lawsuits. For now, Lorient, Buchanan, Chambers and McDougal know their season is real.

Hundreds of other athletes from the same recruiting class are still waiting on a judge somewhere to tell them theirs is too.