US degrees are very different from UK ones particularly if you are an athlete, the level of academic support for good athletes is phenomenal and colleges do their utmost to retain them, valued athletes are admitted in the majority of institutions with much lower scores in their SAT s than non athletes they get advice as to how to minimise their work load in terms of the modules they select and almost exclusively one to one tutoring. My impression is that Faris doing a tough degree at an academic college with an elite lucrative football program there should be lots of help.

There are lots of options for taking time out and going back, Tiger Woods never graduated but still talks about going back to finish off. Your college could ( and often do with quarterbacks in football) redshirt their students ie give them the whole year off still on scholarship to train but not play competitively for the college, in so doing optimise the 4 years of NCAA eligibility.

Even the superstar players, eg Andrew Luck was redshirted went to college for 5 years playing as a 5 th year senior despite being the likely no 1 draft pick in his 4 th year, despite getting a good degree everything was done to optimise the likelihood of him being an NFL superstar. A guy called Tyler Gaffney got drafted and took a year out to play professional baseball in the Pirates system only to comeback and play out his final year of college football without breaching his amateur football status and is now playing football in the NFL. Theses guys are also academically elite ie went to a college where the entrance standard is not lowered but there is lots and lots of help. if you get injured you can grey shirt the year and retain your year of eligibility.

I think taking 6 months of to play professional tennis as an amateur is pretty straight forward, there are obvious benefits for both college and player should he return.