CONFIRMED: NCAA has ruled Olivier Sarr eligible, but UK still needs SEC waiver

UPDATE

According to Ben Roberts of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the NCAA has granted a waiver for Olivier Sarr to play this season. However, Kentucky still needs a waiver from the SEC for Sarr to be eligible for the 2020-21 college basketball season.

You have to feel good about Sarr’s chances of being ruled eligible if the NCAA has already given him a waiver. But it’s been two months now and still no word from the league on if he can play, so it’s clearly no slam dunk.

Next season doesn’t begin for another two months. Hopefully, the SEC doesn’t take that much time to make a decision.

So...after months of speculation as to whether or not the NCAA would grant a transfer waiver to Olivier Sarr, it may have already happened.

According to ESPN commentator Dick Vitale, the NCAA has already granted a waiver to Sarr, but Kentucky is still waiting to get a waiver from the SEC (which we wrote about Monday).

Larry Vaught says he’s heard the same, so maybe the NCAA really has ruled Sarr eligible, though it’s a little hard to believe that, if the NCAA did make a decision two months ago, it’s taken two months (and counting) for the SEC to make a decision.

Yes, Sarr technically shouldn’t be eligible next season based on the SEC transfer rules, which include the requirement of non-grad transfers to have two seasons left of eligibility to be eligible to play in the league (which seems like a really archaic rule that doesn’t accomplish anything good).

But I find it hard to believe that the combination of John Calipari, Mitch Barnhart, Sandy Bell and DeWayne Peevy (before he left for DePaul in August) didn’t have a good idea of how the SEC would rule this decision when they took a commitment from Sarr. My guess is they felt very confident they’d get a waiver from the SEC when Sarr committed not long after he announced he was leaving Wake Forest, or else they would have explored other options.

Whatever the case is, spending the entire summer wondering about Sarr getting a waiver from the NCAA, only to learn the waiver was granted months ago, feels like the most 2020 thing ever.

Now...we just keep waiting.

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