MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 19 in the case of four West Virginia University students who filed suit against the NCAA last week to have their athletic eligibility extended so that they can play football for the Mountaineers during the 2025 season.
Jimmori Robinson, Justin Harrington, Jeffrey Weimer, and Tye Edwards argue that the years they spent competing at the junior college level should not count against their four seasons of collegiate participation, and their attorney, John Gianola, said not allowing them to play would both end the athletes’ college careers and harm them financially.
“For a lot of these kids, especially kids that have a real shot of going to the NFL, there’s a very short window within which they can play college sports; they can sort of make a living at it or make any sort of money at it and then hope for a shot in the NFL,” Gianola said on MetroNews “Talkline” Wednesday.
All four players previously played at the junior college level, and according to Gianola, what was once believed to be a wide-ranging waiver allowing continued eligibility for former junior college athletes does not necessarily appear to be allowing what many thought it would.
“It sort of got walked back and said, ‘Well, we didn’t mean the five-year limit (to play four seasons), we didn’t mean this,’ and so these kids are being penalized because they spent time in junior college,” he said.
The suit filed by the four current WVU students is not the only one that has drawn headlines when it comes to former junior college athletes attempting to have their NCAA eligibility extended. A ruling in favor of Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia led to the previous waiver that many believed provided blanket coverage in the matter, while more recently, former Mountaineer Cortez Braham was granted a seventh year of eligibility by a Nevada judge that ruled his junior college seasons should not count.
Gianola believes the NCAA is attempting to hold on to its control as long as possible.
“For whatever reason, the NCAA is sort of making these kids fight it out in every court instead of saying, ‘Ok look, we’ve lost a couple of times. The judges have seen this. We’re just going to grant this.’ Instead, they seem to be fighting tooth and nail wherever they can,” he said.
With the start of the 2025 college football season less than a month away, the four athletes in question are still unable to participate in preseason workouts with their teams, despite being permitted inside team facilities. Gianola said all they want is a consistent message from the NCAA.
“We’re not advocating that there shouldn’t be an NCAA, that there shouldn’t be any eligibility rules. We’re not advocating for that,” he said. “We’re advocating that ‘hey look, your rules have to make sense. They have to be applied fairly, and they can’t unnecessarily harm the student-athletes.'”
West Virginia opens the 2025 football season on Aug. 30 against Robert Morris.