Babacar Sane is temporarily eligible at St. John’s because a Queens judge looked at a blank form field and refused to rubber-stamp it. That is the cleanest way to read Judge Karina Alomar’s temporary restraining order. The NCAA had already denied his reinstatement on Aug. 13 with three words: “intent to professionalize.” Sane’s attorneys answered with a 55-page filing that said the decision “cites no controlling bylaw, does not discuss Sané’s graduation plan or degree commitment, and leaves blank the form’s field for case precedent.” Alomar granted the TRO pending an Oct. 1 hearing. Until then, the 6-foot-8 Senegalese wing can practice and play.
I keep coming back to the mechanism, not the drama. Players with pro résumés start provisionally ineligible. Reinstatement is the path. The Eligibility Center had already counted two seasons remaining for Sane. St. John’s appealed the denial. The association still held the line. The lawsuit then listed roughly 90 to 100 cleared players whose experience, the filing argues, is materially indistinguishable from his. One of them already wears a St. John’s jersey.
Prey Practices. Sane Needed a Court Order.
Rick Pitino put the inconsistency in an affidavit without dressing it up. “Ruben Prey plays for us. He was paid to play for Joventut Badalona in the Spanish ACB before he came to Queens. He practices with us every day, and nobody at the NCAA has ever suggested to me that there is anything wrong with that.” Prey is the control group. Same campus, same staff, same association, different outcome.
Sane’s path is longer and louder: NBA Academy Africa, G League Ignite, an Exhibit 10 with the Utah Jazz he never played under after the waiver, Salt Lake City Stars and Iowa Wolves, US Monastir in the BAL, then MHP Riesen Ludwigsburg in the German BBL. Last season in Germany he posted 9.9 points and 3.8 rebounds in 16.7 minutes across 32 games, 46.7 percent from the field, 34.6 percent from three, double figures in 17 of those 32. That is a developmental wing profile, not a finished pro cashing out.
Pitino again, same affidavit: “I recruit internationally, and I have for a long time. Recruiting a young man who has been paid to play somewhere else is ordinary now, and until this case I had no reason to think the association treated it as a problem.” Ordinary until it isn’t. The bylaw language never caught up to the market the NCAA itself helped create.
The Graduation Plan the Form Left Blank
The education piece is the one the denial allegedly skipped. “Babacar is not a finished basketball player. That is the whole reason to come to college,” Pitino wrote. “He came here to get better, and player development is what I have done for fifty years. He also wants a college education. College is important to him and to his family, and he will get a world class education here at St. John’s.”
Then the family detail that turns a roster decision into something sharper. His grandmother raised him in Bignona in a house with fifteen to twenty relatives. School was not free. His mother paid fees by cooking in other people’s houses. NBA Academy Africa pulled him into English classes and American coursework until he earned a high school diploma. “Nobody in his family has been to college in this country. He would be the first.” He enrolled in summer classes, moved to Queens, and is on the books for the fall semester. St. John’s offered a revenue-sharing and NIL package worth more than $1 million. The association still called it professionalization without citing the bylaw that made Prey clean and Sane dirty.
Oct. 1 is the hearing date. It also lands on Big East Media Day. The TRO is temporary; the association will answer. I expect them to restate the intent language rather than explain the Prey gap in writing. Courts keep filling the holes the reinstatement process leaves blank. A 22-year-old wing who shoots 34.6 percent from three in the BBL and wants the degree his family never got is eligible today because a judge refused to ignore an empty precedent field. That is the whole fight until October.
