A Word About the Sham of College Ball

March Through Madness

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Mark Coatney

Devin Gordon

Mark Starr

Featured Postings

Though it's March Madness, We Know April is the Coolest Month

1:17 PM, April 1, 2008 | Comments (0)

March gets all the ink, and the fancy "Madness" nickname, but as a top-to-bottom sports fan, I'm finding myself much more partial to April. We get the Final Four and the national title game, then the Masters just a few days later. And wrapped all around...

The Ivies Muscle Up

4:12 PM, March 28, 2008 | Comments (0)

Teams to Root for--and Against

11:11 AM, March 27, 2008 | Comments (0)

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Mark Starr

Devin, you've got nothing on me when it comes to the twin towers of fuddy and duddy. Tomorrow I will surrender to the infectious thrill of 12 hours straight of tournament basketball, bolstered by a "I can't believe they are paying me to watch this" giddiness. But today I am fuddy and duddy and cynical and somewhat appalled with the rah-rah sham that is our collegiate game. I understand why forcing O.J. Mayo and other high-school superstars to play a year of college ball (and NBA Commissioner David Stern is now going to push for an added year) is a win-win for basketball, college and pro. The college gets the cream of the crop for at least a year and then the NBA inherits, hopefully, a more mature talent as well as some rookies with bigger names and market value. Still, it's a devil's deal, an academic fraud. The NCAA handles cynics like me who would like to see both USC and K State--with their rent-a-players extraordinaire, Mayo and Michael Beasley--lose by making that impossible, matching them up in the first round. It's worth noting, though, that this super NBA season, with its extraordinary scrum of fine teams in the Western Conference and the Celtics revival in the East, has nothing at all to do with last year's biggest-name one-season-and-out college players. Greg Oden hasn't played a minute for Portland and Kevin Durant has probably played well enough to win Rookie of the Year honors, but not well enough to save the franchise in Seattle or to keep the Supersonics from a 60-loss season. In fact the NBA MVP and the center of attention in the league this season is Kevin Garnett, one of the early straight-out-of-high-school stars.

But let's not stop with this minor matter. How about a shout out for Richard Lapchick who, first at Northeastern and now at University of Central Florida, has tried to hold the college basketball programs accountable through his annual report on graduation rates. Everything is, of course, relative and there appears to be some uptick in the graduation rates of this year's tournament teams. Still, it is hardly an impressive showing--with what, Lapchick notes, is still an alarming disparity between the graduation rates for white (77%) and black basketball players (53%) throughout Division I. Every year the schools with embarrassing numbers insist they have improved, but it isn't yet reflected in these numbers. Still, this systemic failure is clearly a different kind of March Madness. Here are some of the graduation rates for the basketball players on tournament teams: American 18%, Arizona 25%, Clemson, 31%, Connecticut 22%, Kansas 45%, Memphis 40%, Georgia 19%, Cal State-Fullerton 27%, Kentucky 23%, Washington State 35%, West Virginia 33%, Tennesee 33%, Texas 33%, Texas A&M 40%, Oklahoma 46%, Oral Roberts 48%, St. Mary's 38%, USC 29%, Temple 43%, UCLA 40% and, long in a class of its own (even if the kids aren't in any classes) UNLV at 15%. And try and remember that this year represents a slight improvement.

Finally, there's another potential academic scandal brewing a la Auburn and Florida State--this one at the University of Michigan. Credit the excellent reporting of the Ann Arbor News, which recently revealed that a single psychology professor, between the fall semester of 2004 and the fall semester of 2007, taught 294 independent study classes--85 percent of those to athletes. An analysis by the newspaper of the transcript of 21 athletes who took either independent study or regular classes with that professor revealed that their average grade in his classes was 3.62, significantly above the 2.57 average they compiled in other courses. According to the News, the university has investigated this matter twice already and come away both times concluding that there is no problem. Why do I doubt that?

I'll be rosy tomorrow. Promise.

Tag(s): Featured, The Men

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