Twenty-five-year-old defensive lineman Jimmori Robinson, who withdrew his name from the 2025 NFL Draft in hopes of playing another college season, will be eligible to play for the West Virginia Mountaineers football team this fall courtesy of a federal judge issuing a preliminary injunction against the NCAA on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey reasoned that NCAA eligibility rules limiting athletes to four seasons of intercollegiate competition—including JUCO competition—in any one sport within a five-year window are problematic under antitrust law. Joining Robinson as plaintiffs are a trio of WVU teammates: wide receiver Jeff Weimer, running back Tye Edwards and safety Justin Harrington. The four started their collegiate journeys at junior colleges in 2018 or 2019. They’ll now be able to play this fall despite exhausting their NCAA eligibility.
Bailey’s ruling is the latest in what has become a sea of cases brought by seasoned college athletes who don’t want to leave college sports, which brings them chances to earn NIL and potential shares of revenue. These cases have yielded conflicting rulings, including one by a federal judge in California on Monday who rejected functionally the same lawsuit brought by players who sought to play for UCLA, USC and San Diego.
Like the judges in cases involving Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia, Rutgers cornerback Jett Elad and Nevada wide receiver Cortez Braham, Jr., Bailey concluded that D-I college football players are members of a “nationwide market for the labor.” As a labor market, those players sell their services to college football programs like NFL players sell their services to NFL teams.
The NCAA stressed how multiple courts have found that NCAA eligibility rules aren’t subject to antitrust scrutiny since those rules concern how long a college student can play a sport. Antitrust law, in contrast, concerns commercial transactions. Bailey wasn’t moved by that argument, dismissing “those decisions” as “grounded in a pre-NIL world.”
Along those lines, Bailey reasoned that NCAA eligibility “is even more commercial now” in light of the House settlement. The judge emphasized that college athletes can land distributions from a school up to $20.5 million for the 2025-2026 academic year. These funds reflect 22% of revenue for power conferences in terms of media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. The larger point, as Bailey sees it, is that whether an athlete can play in college is more of a commercial topic given NIL deals and revenue sharing, and therefore it is appropriate for antitrust scrutiny.
Bailey also wasn’t persuaded by the NCAA arguing (in the judge’s words) that eligibility rules are “essential to the survival of amateur sports and to maintaining a product distinct from professional sports.” One concern with college athletes not joining their graduating classmates and entering the real world is that college sports could morph into more of a minor league, populated by veteran college players who (at least in theory) remain eligible for years as graduate student players. Bailey didn’t find that line of thinking persuasive. He reasoned that the product could remain distinct with college athletes playing longer than four years.
The NCAA also didn’t score points with Bailey by noting that college athletes not leaving roster spots necessarily means other athletes won’t get those same spots. Bailey emphasized that same problem is already occurring with the transfer portal: Colleges use the portal to acquire new players, and those players take spots that would have gone to incoming freshmen. Bailey is no stranger to NCAA rules and transfers: he was the judge in 2023 who granted a temporary restraining order against the NCAA that prohibited the association from enforcing a rule that restricts athletes transferring from their second college to their third college.
The NCAA can appeal Bailey’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
In a statement shared with Sportico, an NCAA spokesperson warned Bailey’s ruling “will lead to high school students losing opportunities to compete in college athletics.” The NCAA also contends the ruling “erodes the academic standards that have for decades ensured student-athletes obtained an education.” The NCAA hopes Congress, through legislation that exempts eligibility rules from antitrust scrutiny, would “provide stability for all college athletes.”
