Honor Huff
MORGANTOWN – The leading scorer from last season’s West Virginia University men’s basketball team has sued the NCAA seeking an injunction that would allow him to play a fifth season.
Honor Huff’s complaint, filed October 2 in Monongalia Circuit Court, argues the NCAA is applying its revised eligibility rules arbitrarily by allowing many athletes to receive five seasons of competition while excluding a group – including Huff – whose fourth season was completed in 2025-26.
The complaint seeks temporary, preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, a declaration that the NCAA’s age-based eligibility decision is unlawful as applied to Huff, damages and attorneys’ fees.
Huff, a 5-foot-10 guard, says he competed in only four collegiate seasons despite spending five academic years in college.
He began at Virginia Military Institute in 2021-22, transferred within the Southern Conference to Chattanooga and sat out the 2022-23 season under the league’s then-existing intraconference-transfer residency rule, according to the filing. He then played two seasons at Chattanooga before transferring to West Virginia for the 2025-26 season.
WVU announced Huff’s signing in April 2025 after he spent the prior two seasons at Chattanooga. At WVU, Huff averaged 16.5 points per game, started all 35 contests, set the school’s single-season record with 120 3-pointers and earned NABC East Region first-team honors, along with an All-Big 12 honorable mention selection, according to the university.
The lawsuit says the Southern Conference’s transfer requirement cost Huff a season of competition even though he remained enrolled and continued his academic progress. Huff graduated from Chattanooga with a bachelor’s degree in business data and analytics and enrolled at WVU as a graduate student, the complaint said.
Under the NCAA’s former Division I framework, athletes generally could play four seasons within a five-year eligibility period. The NCAA in June adopted an age-based model that generally permits athletes to compete during each of five years of eligibility if they entered college by the academic year after turning 19.
But Huff alleges the NCAA’s transition policy excludes athletes who exhausted their fourth season under the former system during 2025-26. He says that creates a disadvantaged group caught between the previous four-season limit and the new five-season framework.
“The NCAA’s decision to deny waivers and exceptions to student-athletes like Honor who exhausted four years of competition at the end of the 2025-2026 season is not about competitive balance or quality control,” the complaint says. “It is a product of timing.”
Huff’s lawsuit does not challenge the NCAA’s new “Five-for-Five” eligibility rule itself. Instead, it challenges the way the NCAA implemented the transition, alleging the association unfairly excluded athletes who had already used four seasons of competition.
The complaint brings claims for tortious interference, breach of contract, promissory estoppel, violation of the West Virginia Antitrust Act and declaratory and injunctive relief. It argues NCAA eligibility restrictions prevent Huff from pursuing roster spots, athletic aid, name, image and likeness deals, institutional revenue-sharing payments, graduate education and professional-development opportunities.
Huff also seeks protection from the NCAA’s “Rule of Restitution,” which can expose schools to sanctions if an athlete participates under a court order that is later reversed or dissolved. The complaint says that possibility could deter a university from offering Huff a roster spot even if a court finds he is eligible during the litigation.
Among the requested remedies, Huff asks the court to bar the NCAA from enforcing eligibility rules or transfer-portal deadlines against him for the 2026-27 academic year; prevent sanctions against him or a school that relies on a court order; award damages; and award treble damages under the state antitrust statute.
Huff’s case follows a federal ruling last week that granted preliminary injunctive relief to four other current or former WVU athletes seeking another season of NCAA eligibility.
On September 30, U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey allowed basketball players Brenen Lorient and Javan Buchanan, football player Jason Chambers and baseball player Benjamin McDougal to compete for available roster positions during the 2026-27 academic year. The ruling barred the NCAA from treating their participation as an eligibility violation and prohibited enforcement of the association’s restitution rule against the athletes or a school that chooses to roster them.
Bailey concluded the athletes were likely to succeed, at least at the preliminary-injunction stage, on their claim that the NCAA’s rule operated as an unlawful restraint on trade under federal antitrust law. His 66-page order described the NCAA’s revised rule as allowing some athletes five years of competition while leaving others who had completed four seasons in 2025-26 outside the transition policy.
The federal case, Lorient v. NCAA, also raised breach-of-contract, tortious-interference and state antitrust claims. Huff’s case similarly alleges that the NCAA’s member institutions compete for athletes’ services and that an eligibility rule uniformly enforced across Division I limits athletes’ access to scholarships, NIL opportunities, revenue sharing and other compensation.
Huff’s complaint notes that the NCAA appealed Bailey’s injunction in the separate federal litigation. The filing also cites litigation elsewhere involving athletes challenging NCAA transition rules after the association’s new eligibility system took effect August 1.
The lawsuit adds another West Virginia court case to the growing, fragmented litigation over the NCAA’s overhaul of Division I eligibility rules.
A lawsuit including both Marshall University and Ohio University students also was filed, but a federal judge already has ruled the athletes failed to meet the demanding standard for the mandatory preliminary injunction they sought, which would have required the NCAA to alter the existing eligibility status quo.
The NCAA said its new model generally gives athletes up to five years of eligibility, with the period beginning at full-time college enrollment or, in certain circumstances, the academic year after an athlete turns 19. For current athletes who still had eligibility after the 2025-26 academic year, schools may apply either the former rules or the new model, whichever is more favorable, according to the NCAA.
Huff contends that exception does not reach athletes in his position: players who had completed four competitive seasons by the end of 2025-26 but had never received a fifth season of actual competition.
His case could determine whether a state court will require the NCAA to extend transition relief to an athlete whose eligibility was affected by a now-defunct conference transfer rule and who seeks one more season under the NCAA’s new five-year framework.
Huff is being represented by Devon Stewart, James A. Gianola and David M. Jecklin of Lewis Gianola in Morgantown. The case has been assigned to Circuit Judge Cindy Scott.
Monongalia Circuit Court case number 26-C-382
