My sense is that turning down who seemingly would have been a very good player for GW due to academics is worthy of its own thread.  I could be totally wrong about this but in this day and age of NIL and transfer portals, I don't even hear about athletes being turned down due to academics anymore.  Sure, a school can still stand behind its mission of being an academic institution first, which is of course what GW has done in this instance.  Nevertheless, what we've seen happen around the country is as follows:

1. Schools have received way too much revenue on the backs of talented athletes who until recently, were not legally paid to represent the school (except in the form of a scholarship which many would argue is not the same as being paid).

2.  Players are essentially competing on year-to-year contracts with the freedom to transfer without restrictions and the right to earn more money over time (or I suppose in some cases, this may translate to less money contingent upon job performance).

3.  The net effects of the above points are that players are playing as much for themselves today than ever before.  The school has become their employer which certainly may carry the implication to recruit the most successful basketball team possible regardless of academics. It would be naive to think that this isn't the mantra across many U.S. college campuses.

This is a long way of saying that when it comes to recruiting athletes, holding academics up as an important criterion for admission may today be regarded as an obsolete premise.  Being a member of the Atlantic 10 does the school no favors.  On the one hand, the conference isn't routinely competitive enough to cite that its member schools are truly competing for national championships (perhaps implying that academics need to greatly matter).  On the other hand, the conference is far more competitive, and by definition produces more revenue, than say The Patriot League whose member schools might be better suited to cry "academics first".  Without knowing who the recent player was or how close he came to meting GW's academic standards, it stands to reason that this young man would likely be accepted by almost all other A10 schools with the possible exceptions of Davidson and Richmond (perhaps Loyola too though I am not sure how they fit in academically).

If this all sounds like frustration, I understand that I am preaching to the choir.  This school has suffered so many self-inflicted wounds and frankly, scandals, that it's become increasingly more difficult to witness any further ones.  It's been over 20 years since the last time GW took "big swings" on behalf of its basketball program, and moves like admitting Omar Williams, Maureece Rice, Carl Elliott and JR Pinnock all paid off handsomely until a certain former school president who never met a microphone that he wouldn't incessantly ramble into made some regrettable remarks that immediately tarnished those team's successes. Since this time, "all ties go to" Rice Hall with everyone from a prolific playmaker (Jeremy Wise) to the son of arguably the greatest player ever to play for GW (Darnell Rogers) being told that they can't play for GW due to academics.

Am sure Rising might be best suited to answer the question of What Needs To Happen though I would understand if he, like the rest of us, lacked any real answers to this question.  If the Board and our new President are behind the decision to hold academics in the highest regard, then we seriously might as well leave the A10 because we will be making it next to impossible to be competitive on a regular basis.  Yet the positive vibes we've been spoon-fed suggest that everyone is now aligned, that building up the program is of the utmost priority.  Buy your season tickets, contribute to NIL, don't forget donating to GW in general, because we are committed to building an upper echelon program.  And then, this!

Finally, the counterargument to all of this is that the school's position could have been (of course we aren't privy to this) that the player in question wasn't anywhere close to meeting GW's academic requirements, that they perhaps could have made an exception had this been a closer call.   Again, I would counter this by suggesting that schools today are providing job opportunities, not just educational opportunities.  The player in question is 100% qualified to do the job that GW would have hired him to do.  Once on campus, education should remain a part of this (a job responsibility, so to speak) and if the player arrives on campus but never attends a class or takes an exam, of course he should get fired and lose his job and scholarship.  But to deny him the right to even land this job for reasons having nothing to do with why he is truly being recruited to attend GW in the first place is hypocrisy at its finest.  Maybe this wasn't true even 3 years ago, but times have changed.  Someone should enlighten the folks inside of Rice Hall.