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Fabricio de Melo, you were so good for, like, 25 games. Shame.
Shame because your potential seemed to go by the wayside for various reasons. Shame, too, because the program is still dealing the effects of his time here.
Chris Carlson got an early read on Bleeding Orange, the Jim Boeheim biography coming out November 4, and spilled some secrets over on Syracuse.com. There's some interesting insights we can get into another time (like how Boeheim would play man-to-man if he were younger, he doesn't talk to Bernie Fine anymore, etc.), but here's the one that stuck out to me...
SU is still under some kind of NCAA investigation regarding Fab Melo...
Boeheim: Speaking of being on the defensive, that's the position you are put in when the NCAA investigates your program, the present state of affairs at Syracuse. You're not allowed to say anything, but meanwhile details of the investigation, some of them misinformed, make their way into the newspapers. You can't defend yourself and the investigation drags on and on. It's wearing. ... We suspended him for three games. After that, we were under the impression that he could appeal and do some academic work to get himself eligible. He did that work. But then there arose a question about how he had gotten eligible, and he was declared ineligible again, right before the NCAA tournament. The issue is extremely complicated, and at any rate I can't really go into it because it is part of an ongoing NCAA investigation. The NCAA does not even want you to acknowledge that you are being investigated. I wish that these issues with the NCAA had been resolved by the time this book came out so I would be free to comment but that is not the case.
Syracuse always seems to be under NCAA investigation for something, so it's not a massive shock. But...it's unnerving all the same. SU has had it's fair share of academic issues in recent years and it concerns me how "complicated" this issue appears to be. Hopefully, SUA didn't wait one academic issue too many before cleaning things up in-house. As we run out the clock on Boeheim's storied career, you'd hate to add a negative footnote like NCAA sanctions to the end of it.