Central Florida's 7-foot-6 Senegalese import Tacko Fall has not been able to scrimmage with his team and could miss the start of the college basketball season because the NCAA has refused to declare him academically eligible. Fall has had a turbulent ride from Senegal to UCF, and bounced around several schools in Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee before finding a home in Liberty Christian Preparatory School in Florida.He spent his first two years of high school back home, before his mother sent him to the United States so he could play basketball. Fall arrived in 2012, and was told he would attend Christian Academy in Texas, but that never happened: he and another recruit were left in an apartment with "no means to communicate with anyone," he wrote in a letter to the NCAA obtained by ESPN.Fall spent the next year jumping from school to school in an attempt to play basketball somewhere. Finally, he landed at Liberty Christian, where he also found a new host, Mandy Wettstein. Despite essentially losing a year of high school, Fall excelled academically. He has a reported 3.6 GPA over his two years at Liberty Christian and speaks four languages. Nevertheless, the NCAA has only accepted credits for 7.5 classes from the school and is further investigating its academic standing. As a result, Fall is not eligible and cannot play for UCF.UCF is seeking an academic waiver from the NCAA. If that fails, Wettstein says, they will sue the NCAA for his eligibility.In many ways, this is the quintessential NCAA story. By all accounts, Fall is a well-adjusted, smart, and engaged student-athlete. He told one outlet he'd be just as happy as a biochemist. Listen to or read an interview with him and you'd think his eligibility should be fast-tracked and slapped in an advertisement. Instead, Fall is yet another student caught in the middle of college sports' shady recruiting nightmare. On the one side is the NCAA—the adults who ostensibly want to protect the integrity of recruiting and, therefore, student-athletes; on the other are the adults who do everything they can to circumvent those rules. Guess who gets screwed in the process.
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