Dozens of Marshall University athletes from different sports went to Cabell County Circuit Court on Monday not only to fight for a season, but also to fight the feeling that the rules had been changed around them right before their eligibility ran out. This is the kind of story that shouldn’t make national news like March Madness does: their lawsuit against the NCAA over its new “5 for 5” eligibility rule.
On June 23, 2026, an NCAA panel agreed to the rule in question. On the surface, it seems fair: instead of playing for four years, student athletes now have five years to play five seasons. But the timer starts ticking either when the school year starts after a player turns 19 or when they start going to college full-time, whichever comes first. They graduated from high school in 2022 and played four seasons without taking a redshirt. The math just doesn’t work out for them. The way the new clock is set up leaves them out. They played by one set of rules until they reached the end of what they were told was their eligibility period. Then they saw a new system take shape that gave some people a fifth year but not them.
Many players are named in the document, such as Bryce Blevins, Dewain “Boogie” Trotter, Meredith Maier, Peyton Ilderton, Blessing King, Paige Simpson, Ryan Holmes, Momo Diop, and Hannah Wyler. They are being helped by Steve New, a lawyer in Beckley. The NCAA is being sued for breaking the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act and the covenant of fair dealing. It also goes after a more specific claim: that the NCAA selectively used its waiver power (Bylaw 12.6.6, for those keeping track) to let former professional athletes play while ignoring the 2022 high school graduating class.
It’s possible that the NCAA didn’t mean for this gap to exist. But intention and result are not the same thing, and it makes sense that the athletes are upset. The lawsuit also brings up a small but important point: in some cases, players who had played professionally kept their college eligibility, but players who had played every season of their college careers were not allowed to continue. Something feels wrong about that comparison, even though the legal and practical reasons are complicated.
Gerald Harrison, the athletic director at Marshall, talked about the situation in public, and he didn’t try to hide how he felt about it. He admitted that his department had to tell these athletes directly that they would not be able to play in the 2026–27 season, which was a tough message. In the same breath, Harrison said he agrees with the new rule. He cited the chaos that the old appeals process caused, where 18-year-old freshmen competed against 26-year-old veterans, which he called “out of hand.” You make a good point. What that means, though, is that the position of these twelve athletes is still hard.
This lawsuit isn’t the only one of its kind. A similar complaint was made by 15 basketball players from Ohio at the end of June. In response to that case, the NCAA said that giving these athletes a fifth year would “create chaos” and make college sports less stable overall. It’s funny that this kind of language is coming from a group that has changed eligibility rules several times in the last few years. The athletes want a court order so they can compete in the 2026–27 season and keep their NIL rights during that time. We still don’t know if a West Virginia circuit court will agree with that.
While watching this, it seems like the NCAA’s new rules on eligibility, no matter how good they are overall, created a group of athletes who did everything right but still got caught breaking a rule they had no control over. The twelve Marshall athletes don’t want to break down the system. They only want one more season.
