Bittersweet End Threatens McElrathbey's Feel-Good Story

Ray Ray McElrathbey became a household name in 2006 when he became the legal guardian of his 11-year-old brother while still a football player at Clemson. Now, McElrathbey's own household has grown -- he not only has custody of Fahmarr, now 14, but also another brother, 19-year-old Cornelius, and a sister, 16-year-old Brittany.

After their mother, struggling with drug problems throughout their lives, could no longer take care of them, McElrathbey now has the responsibility of taking care of three of his seven siblings. He has a trust fund started to allow fans to contribute to his raising them, and he has a bachelor's degree from Clemson and one semester to go to get his masters.

What he does not have is a senior year of football. Nor does he have terribly fond opinions of the school to which he transferred after graduating from Clemson with two years of eligibility left -- and which, for reasons he still cannot get a full explanation, kept him from playing a single snap in the 2009 season and appears unwilling to help him regain that lost season.

Instead, McElrathbey, at age 23, has this sentiment about his journey after leaving Clemson, expressed two months ago: "I'm getting screwed.''

What seemed at the time to be a completely understandable crisis fairly easy to work around -- a recurrence of the situation that originally turned McElrathbey into his younger brother's guardian -- ended up snowballing into the disastrous year this has become. Just before final exams last spring, McElrathbey left Howard abruptly and returned to Atlanta, costing him incomplete grades in two courses.

Why? "My mom disappeared,'' he said -- referring to his mother, Tonya, whose drug addiction had left him, his brother and other siblings in foster care and triggered his decision to seek custody of Fahmarr. "I had to go back and find her. Nobody knew where she was.''

The short version of what happened next: Howard declared him academically ineligible for the 2009 season -- but, he said, did not tell him until he was boarding the team bus to go to Rutgers for the season opener in early September. Besides the inexplicable timing, McElrathbey is certain that Howard's decision was wrong: there was nothing in the NCAA bylaws or in the school's academic guidelines that would make him, a second-year graduate student with a 2.7 grade-point average even with the incompletions, ineligible to play.

Yet he never set foot on the field, and things have only spiraled downward since -- including at home, where his mother still struggles to beat her drug addiction and where McElrathbey supports her along with Fahmarr, Brittany and Cornelius.

Adding to McElrathbey's exasperation is the fact that the school putting him through these trials, historically black Howard in Washington, had been the savior that had come to the rescue of his football and educational dreams. After being acclaimed nationally as a hero and role model for taking in Fahmarr, McElrathbey wound up looking for a place to finish playing football in 2008 after Clemson clumsily took back his scholarship, igniting a public-relations firestorm by implying that it was because he seemed less committed because of his new family obligations. In fact, he had torn up his knee the year before and, while rehabbing it, graduated after three years.

Landing at Howard, an FCS program with a sparkling academic reputation, and playing his final two seasons (because of the injury-induced redshirt season at Clemson) was supposed to give the story a happy ending. Instead, after unsuccessfully weaving through the red tape at Howard and with the NCAA, he wound up sitting recently in the school's gym and glumly facing two facts: he has played college football for the last time, and his longshot hopes of playing in the NFL, even after the injury and after transferring to a lower-level program, are even more of an uphill climb with a senior year that didn't exist.

"I think it's over,'' McElrathbey said, at the end of a day trudging to every corner of Howard's campus just to get cleared by various departments to enroll in classes and begin receiving the "discretionary'' financial grant that the school approved to replace the football scholarship had it revoked, virtually without warning.

Next month, McElrathbey, a running back who had run 4.3 in the 40 before tearing his left ACL, will try out for pro scouts -- at Clemson's pro day. "I'd get a better look at Clemson,'' he said, adding that there even have been complications in getting footage of him playing for Howard in 2008 to teams.

Meanwhile, the chaos of the last two semesters has forced him to separate from the three siblings under his care -- all three attend school in Atlanta because plans to have them live and attend school in Washington had to be scrapped at the last second. Fahmarr moved back last semester when McElrathbey lost his scholarship and, thus, his housing allowance.

"He knew my situation up here. He didn't like it, just like I didn't like it,'' McElrathbey said of Fahmarr. "He liked being up here. Besides having the scholarship we also had housing, and that was in danger ... I told him no matter what happens, we'd be together, and we'd go on from there.''

From that day in September, when he got the unwelcome news at the team bus, until now, McElrathbey has heard several explanations to why he couldn't play, has been up and down the various chains of command in the Howard athletic and academic hierarchies, pleaded his case to officials at the school, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the NCAA, begged for a chance (and was denied) to talk to the school president, and said of the university provost's office, "I spent so many hours over there, they could have put me on payroll.''

He briefly considered legal action, but cannot afford a lawyer. He now is counting on the workouts for pro scouts, who he said routinely showed up for Howard games unaware that he was not on the roster. In limited action for Howard in 2008, returning from knee surgery, he gained 571 all-purpose yards and scored four touchdowns, then in the spring game turned a short pass into a 75-yard score. He was listed as a starter going into this season.

"I geared up for this season. This was it. This was all supposed to work out for both parties,'' McElrathbey said in December, as Cornelius sat nearby. "[But] I promise you I've had more problems here than I'd ever imagined. I'm pretty positive about stuff, but this is hard.

"I had expectations of this great reunion, this great experience, the last hope,'' he continued. "It's been bittersweet. I mean, Howard, academically, the professors, teachers, classes, students, socially, has been great. Athletically, I've had the worst troubles I could imagine.''

The eligibility issue is complex and, in many ways, baffling. While he did get incompletes on the two courses, he said he was not only never informed of a problem until the last second, he got conflicting information of exactly what the problem was and what he could do to fix it. When he hurriedly made up the courses in two weeks, he said, it brought his grade-point average to a more-than-acceptable 2.7, but he was then told that as a graduate student, he needed to maintain a 3.0 to play. Yet his grant-in-aid from Howard, originally signed last June, was amended and re-signed in August to stipulate that he would be subject to the undergraduate grade-point minimum of 2.0 rather than the one required for good academic standing among graduate students.

Both the 2009-10 NCAA bylaws and Howard's student-athlete handbook indicate that McElrathbey falls through the cracks. Only a handful of times in the 43 pages of the NCAA's Article 14, covering eligibility, are graduate students even mentioned, primarily to state that they can play, and to describe how they can appeal or gain waivers on unfavorable eligibility rulings. Howard's handbook does not refer to postgraduate eligibility at all, but does discuss remaining in good standing, making progress toward a degree and, again, appeals processes.

"They talk about one year as a grad student, but if you're in your second year, then you're in la-la land,'' he said, adding, "Basically, they're making it harder for the guy with a degree than for the guy who doesn't.''

McElrathbey also believes that a lot slipped through the cracks about the school's knowledge about his eligibility. He has heard differing accounts about who knew it was in doubt and when, but has been informed at times that he should have known it before that day boarding the bus. His reply: "How was I supposed to know? You all didn't even know.''

Intensifying the problem, McElrathbey said, is that he was told that the NCAA would listen to an appeal, as long as it came from the school itself, specifically one of an approved selection of academic and athletic representatives. He has direct knowledge of how that can happen: Clemson had sought and won a waiver of the extra-benefits rule, allowing McElrathbey to accept donations of money and resources to help with Fahmarr.

But no one from Howard has spoken to the NCAA to support him, he said. What was done, after the school revoked his scholarship for not being in good academic standing -- and even that can be disputed, he said, since he had been on scholarship throughout the summer, after his grades had been posted -- was that it gave him a "discretionary grant,'' as he was told it was called, to cover his tuition and expenses.

McElrathbey said he was told he was being given the grant due to "an administrative error ... That means there's something you did wrong on your side. You gave me $27,000 -- you made a $27,000 mistake, but I'm the one suffering.'' The nature of the term, meanwhile, leaves him wondering if and when the grant might be taken away on a whim.

Furthermore, he said, being told literally at the last possible second left him with no options, even though it would appear that there would be plenty of time between the end of the previous semester and the football opener -- after the start of fall classes and after the time all athletes must be cleared academically -- to have told him that the incomplete courses could cost him his eligibility.

"It's not like I'm just trying to throw Howard under the bus,'' McElrathbey said. "I just want to make sure that when I tell this story, it doesn't sound crazy.''

Multiple requests for comment and clarification were not returned by the NCAA, the Howard athletic department compliance office, head football coach Carey Bailey or university provost Dr. Alvin Thornton.

McElrathbey's unique situation stems from his final days at Clemson, after it took back his scholarship with a shady explanation. The truth, it has since come out, was that Clemson was looking to free up a scholarship, and with his injury and with him earning his sociology degree in three years, he was an easy target. He, the program and former coach Tommy Bowden have made their peace. McElrathbey is on such good terms with the school now, he often wears a Clemson hoodie around campus, is welcome at its pro day, and has not ruled out the possibility of coaching there at some point.

Further proving the strong ties with his former school, he was asked to speak at the funeral last month of teammate Gaines Adams, who had died of heart complications, and whom McElrathbey thought of as "my big brother.''

He has expected to bond just as well with Howard: "I could have gone to a few places to play football,'' he said, "but I came for the academics. It's a prestigious thing to have a masters degree from Howard University.''

He is on schedule to get his masters in sports management in May; had he managed to regain a year of eligibility from the NCAA, he said he would start working on a doctorate. Getting his year restored, of course, would require Howard appealing to the NCAA for him, but nobody who officially can has done so, he said.

"Howard would have to admit it made a mistake,'' he said. "Nobody's going to stand up and say, 'I made a mistake.' Nobody is speaking up on my behalf.''

Yes, McElrathbey said, he did notice the paradox of an athlete with such scholastic achievements and aspirations getting caught up in an academic Catch-22.

"What kind of a message are you sending to a football player like me?'' he said. "You might as well tell him, 'Don't go to graduate school, because they'll make it too hard for you to play if you do, and they'll hold you to a different standard.' ... So an athlete will say, 'I won't graduate. Or if I do graduate, I won't go to graduate school. Are you crazy, and have to get a 3.0?' "

McElrathbey never believed balancing all that he took on would be easy. But he did not anticipate the obstacles put in his path for, in his mind, very little reason. "I think I'll just be happy when it's over,'' he said of what he will take from his two years at Howard. "I got through it -- that's all I can say.''

That, expressed late last month, was more resigned than what he had earlier said he had hoped would be the resolution.

"Can I at least get an apology?'' he said then. "'Sorry we [messed] up your life,' something?"