Fabtastic Rumors

With the “official-unofficial” word that Fab Melo will be returning to the Syracuse lineup this Saturday against St. John’s I wanted to revisit two of the most outlandish and ill-informed rumors that sprang up during his absence.

The rumor that I saw the most and in reality was one of the most ridiculous was that an entire class had to retake an exam because of cheating.  This was humorous for several reasons:  the first reason being that it is not even a requirement for professors at Syracuse to give a final exam.  In fact during my time at SU I would say that around 50% of my courses did not have a final exam.  If there was some sort of cheating I do not believe the university could require the entire class to retake an exam in the middle of January.  Let’s say I am a senior and my last semester happened to be the Fall 2011 semester.  Are you trying to tell me that I would have to wait until the end of January to find out if I actually graduated?!?!  So once I found out, that I didn’t graduate it would be too late for me to pick up a course in the new semester!  Talk about a bunch of lawsuits waiting to happen!

While the rumor of the cheating and retaking scandal was pretty ridiculous, the most ridiculous rumor I saw was that Fab had boarded a plane to Brazil at Hancock International Airport.  Supposedly, the last flight of the night, which happened to be heading for Brazil, was leaving at 8:45ish.  This was ridiculous on two fronts, the first being the basic concept.  This was also ridiculous because if the message board poster had looked two posts down they would have seen a twitter pic of Fab with three co-eds at a Syracuse restaurant that was taken at 7:35.  Looking four posts down would have shown the poster the first of multiple posts stating Fab was at practice earlier in the day.  So this poster expected us to believe that Fab Melo had practiced with a team he was going to desert, went out to dinner one last time in the United States, posed for some twitter pics, and then rushed to the airport to catch a flight from Syracuse, NY to some destination in Brazil.  I had to laugh out loud reading this rumor.

Now that it is all but official that Fab is coming back, we can really start to appreciate some of the rumors that had been flying around.  I don’t claim to know what really happened, but I would be willing to wager that 99.9% of the rumors had very little connection to reality.