A football player at Baylor University has been kicked off the team after being ruled ineligible. His apparent offense: Not being homeless.
Silas Nacita, nicknamed “Salsa Nacho” after an autocorrect blunder, has a story that would inspire almost anybody. After a falling out with his mother, Nacita spent his senior year of high school sleeping on the couches of various friends, but nevertheless maintained a 4.1 GPA and earned a scholarship to Cornell. However, his dream was to play football for Baylor.
After spending a year in community college waiting tables, Nacita saved up enough money to enroll, and walked on with Baylor’s football team, where as a sophomore he ran for 191 yards and 3 touchdowns. In addition to his success on the football field, Nacita was also an Academic All-Big 12.
However, as a walk-on, Nacita didn’t receive any of the benefits afforded to scholarship players, including room and board. Nacita faced the prospect of being homeless, until, he says, a family friend offered to put him up in an apartment so that he wouldn’t spend the year sleeping on floors.
That help, it turns out, runs afoul of NCAA rules that prohibit players from accepting almost any significant gift from anybody other than parents and legal guardians. On Wednesday, it went public that Baylor had removed Nacita from the team due to violations of eligibility rules.
Nacita released a full statement via Twitter Wednesday morning, saying that he accepted his removal and was “devastated, but not defeated:”
All I wanted to do was go to school and play the game I loved. pic.twitter.com/zYQ0HTaz05
— Silas Nacita (@Salsa_Nacho) February 25, 2015
Mark Seymour at Our Daily Bears, a Baylor fan site, was sharply critical of how the NCAA regards gifts:
“Honestly, I’m not sure what the NCAA expects athletes to do in this situation, where they don’t have an athletic scholarship but are working hard to get one, beyond just not being athletes in the first place. If he was a regular student, nobody would care where he slept or if he paid for it. But because he’s a football player and not on scholarship, he’s held to a higher standard? Unless it’s the school paying for it surreptitiously in an effort to skirt the NCAA’s scholarship limits, why do they even care?”
Update: An earlier version of this story indicated that the NCAA declared Nacita ineligible. The NCAA has announced that it did not declare him ineligible. Rather, the decision appears to have been made by Baylor itself:
The NCAA did not declare Silas Nacita ineligible and Baylor has not requested a waiver for him.
— NCAA (@NCAA) February 25, 2015
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