Where Guy-Marc Michel's case is so different from other Euro kids...
not only did he play on a team with other pros, he actually signed a contract to play with the French pro team, which actually is far more serious of a violation than just playing as a call-up from the amateur team...
(And since he signed such a pro-contract AFTER he had enrolled in college, the minimum NCAA penalty for such a violation is a FULL year plus 2 additional game for each game played in).
...so, even if the NCAA were to clear Michel, his penalty would be like Lucca Staiger's at Iowa State or like Mario Stula's at DePaul -- he'd be docked one entire YEAR plus 2X the number of games he played professionally (10 more).
Then the other big mistake was that he obviously enrolled in college in fall of 2006 in France....this is apparently not being disputed...thus his NCAA eligibility clock would run out in spring of 2011, and he'd be unable to serve the penalty and have any eligibility remaining..
BUT -- here's the real question...
if this is all the case...then the kid perhaps wasted at least two and maybe three years of his life going to junior college and now IU....since the only reason he's doing that is to get eligible at D-I ---
Had he known of this outcome, he could have stayed in France and played pro ball the last 3 years and made a decent income...and in all likelihood, now he'll just leave Indiana and go back to Europe...unless he wants to stay and get his degree.
So couldn't he have filed all his papers 3 years ago and had the NCAA rule on this so he could have known then -- the facts have NOT changed since 2007, so so he could have gotten and known the same ruling 3 years ago -- so it's tough on the kid to find himself in his 3rd season in America, but no eligibility left and still he has never played a single D-I game.
I'd say his handlers didn't do a very good job for this kid......nor did the folks at Indiana...
The NCAA Eligibility Center is right there in Indianapolis -- couldn't they have started this process for the kid a little more promptly and efficiently amd gottena ruling..now they've tied up a scholarship on a kid who can't play and the kid has virtually nowhere to go in the US to ever earn a living playing basketball.
http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/113010aac.html
But here's the thing that galls me....how did this kid get cleared by NJCAA and allowed to play
two full seasons in junior college, when the exact same set of rules denied John Wilkins the
ability to ever play a single minute in juco? Just more proof that the decision against JW
was arbitrary, capricious, unfair, and motivated by some form of agenda....
Plus there are hundreds of other similar juco kids who have more professional ties than Wilkins
ever had and not one has ever missed even one single second of play for their junior college.
So there's even more evidence that something peculiar motivated the JW decision...and it clearly was NOT
because Wilkins violated rules that they ever bothered to enforce at any point ever in all their history..