http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/sp...ll/24GRAD.html
March 24, 2004
Graduation Is Secondary for Many in Final 16
By JOE DRAPE
The N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament is once more whittled to a field of 16, and among the teams are a few surprises. Graduation rates among players on the remaining teams have once more been analyzed in studies, and in that regard there have been no surprises: only four Duke, Kansas, Vanderbilt and Xavier posted graduation rates of 50 percent or better.
Sixteen of the teams that made the tournament's initial field of 65 had graduation rates of 25 percent or less. Four of those teams did not graduate a player within the six years allotted, according to the latest National Collegiate Athletic Association graduation data.
"It's reprehensible and disappointing," the N.C.A.A. president, Myles Brand, said of the overall findings. "I think the current system permits student-athletes in basketball to move through school without getting a degree."
Brand says he believes, however, that an academic reform package the N.C.A.A. is expected to adopt next month the so-called incentive/disincentive plan will soon allow university officials and fans to take pride in their basketball team's on-court performance without having to be embarrassed about failures in the classroom.
Teams that do not perform well academically could lose scholarships and be barred from postseason play, potentially losing millions of dollars in revenue for their respective colleges. Teams that perform well in the classroom, on the other hand, would be entitled to additional revenue through the N.C.A.A.'s distribution formula and would pick up more scholarships and receive other benefits like additional graduate assistant coaches.
Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, said that the new plan was overdue and that it could improve poor academic performance, especially in high-profile sports like basketball and football.
In his own studies over the previous 10 years, Lapchick has found, among other things, that more than 50 Division I basketball programs had failed to graduate even one black player.
"This would be the first time ever the N.C.A.A. would hand out sanctions for schools that fail to deliver on the promise of an education when they open their doors to athletes," Lapchick said.
Yesterday, he released his survey, "Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Rates and Diversity in Campus Leadership for 2004 Men's Sweet 16 Teams."
"There also are rewards for teams that do it right, which are not many if you look at the 16 teams," he said of the pending N.C.A.A. incentive/disincentive plan.
Of the teams still left in the N.C.A.A. tournament, Kansas had the top graduation rate among players, at 73 percent, followed by Duke and Xavier at 67 percent and Vanderbilt at 62 percent.
The other 12 teams had graduation rates below 50 percent, and 7 of them graduated 33 percent or less of their men's basketball players. Those colleges, according to a separate study released by the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, were Alabama; Alabama at Birmingham; Connecticut; Georgia Tech; Nevada; Oklahoma State; and Pittsburgh.
The N.C.A.A. did not release campus-specific graduation rates for 16 teams in the 65-field tournament. Those 16 colleges fell under the federal Department of Education's ruling last year that graduation rate information could not be published for a class in which there were fewer than three athletes on scholarships or fewer than three who graduated.
"We feel uncomfortable, too, when we see these rates published, and agree with the new structure," said Jim Haney, executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. "We've all raised the bar academically, and when kids know how high the bar is set they'll go meet it."
The Knight Commission chairman, William C. Friday, president emeritus of the University of North Carolina, said he was not so sure.
"When you see poor graduation rates, recruiting violations and instances of academic fraud, any thoughtful sports fan can see that we've created an entertainment industry and, in the process, it has eroded the integrity of the university," Friday said.
"It is a good first step, but it is going to take a lot more than that," he said of the proposed N.C.A.A. plan. "We need to step back and take the pressure off college sports. That means getting some discipline back in our dealings with television networks and keeping coaches' salaries down. We are not honoring our moral duty to these student athletes."
Indeed, the graduation rates of athletes in revenue-generating sports like basketball are at variance with the performance of students in other sports.
Sixty-two percent of all scholarship athletes who entered Division I colleges for the 1996-97 academic year graduated in the six-year window allowed for such statistics. Only 42 percent of the players in men's basketball programs in Division I graduated, however.
"There are some loopholes that haven't serve us well in sports like men's basketball," Brand said. "We intend to change that."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company