I happened upon an interesting statistic the other day regarding college athletes. It was followed up by 18 words in the corner of page 22 of the NBA Preview edition of Sports Illustrated magazine. This may be the most attention that individual blurb ever gets.
The graduation rate of NCAA athletes in 2007 (defined by the number of student-athletes who began school in 2001 and received bachelor’s degrees) was 79 percent. That’s the highest rate it has ever been.
Meanwhile, Oregon’s men’s basketball head coach Ernie Kent has been hard at work building a program that graduates players. In 2007, the Ducks’ five seniors – Malik Hairston, Mitch Platt, Bryce Taylor, Ray Schafer and Maarty Leunen – were flaunted proudly, diplomas in hand before the season began. The University’s men’s basketball Academic Progress Rate (APR), which measures how well schools perform in keeping their athletes academically eligible, came back from the NCAA at 975 out of 1,000, the highest in the Pacific-10 Conference – and beat out Stanford and Cal.
Football may be a game of inches, but evidently the Oregon coaching staff measures it in degrees, according to one billboard displayed in Eugene and Salem. Eighteen Duck seniors are neatly arranged in three rows of six.
What in the name of Dexter Manley is going on here?
This is not the American college athletics scene we know and love. Where are the head coaches of fine institutions, such as Western University and Tech, to dole out tractors to parents and hot coeds to recruits? Where is the money to pay rent for the student-athlete’s family’s new, multi-million dollar home close to its budding star? What happened to tutors writing papers, paying jobs without mandatory hours, shopping sprees at Foot Locker, private audiences with Luther Campbell, the Benjamins slipped into handshakes, free months-long usage of expensive vehicles from dealerships, and feature articles in national sports publications calling for the “student-athlete” label to be stripped from the modern collegiate athletic lexicon?
Florida State safety Myron Rolle is only contributing to the confusion. Rolle is a junior with 182 career tackles and a sure-fire NFL future. He’s blazing-fast (a sprinter on the Seminoles’ track team) and incredibly durable (he has played in 32 consecutive games). Rolle is also finishing up his paperwork for a Rhodes scholarship. As in Cecil, not Kerry. The kind of thing that’s mostly reserved for future U.S. presidents. What does a football star need an Oxford education for?
Thank the Lord for Southeastern Conference (SEC) football – if ever the nation needs verification that the institution of sport is to intellectualism what Ebenezer Scrooge was to compassion, it can just look to these 12 successful teams. Yet, if Division I football teams were ranked on the basis of APR score from 2007, the SEC would have five in the top 10. Yes, Vanderbilt was on that list, but that still makes no sense. ESPN’s Pat Forde had it right: “The SEC is either doing a great job with academic support, or its tutors are doing all the work.”
College football isn’t the most important example, it’s just the one with the most fodder. After all, who can forget Bob Huggins’ remarkable zero-percent graduation rate at Cincinnati? We also owe the NBA some thanks for introducing “one-and-done” into the lexicon. Brandon Jennings didn’t like the idea of having to sit through a semester of classes, so he left for Rome to play professional basketball and work on his game. In June, Jennings will be drafted by some lucky NBA team and sign a seven-figure contract – all before he can legally consume alcohol. What a wonderful world.
Minor sports aren’t exempt, either. We just don’t care about them as much. Be sure to ask Tiger Woods what happened to his Stanford diploma.
Think of it this way, though: If NCAA institutions are graduating 79 percent of their “student”-athletes, we must be doing well as a nation, no? The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education doesn’t seem to agree with Joe Populace. Using the same six-year benchmark, 56.1 percent of college students earned their bachelor’s by 2007 in the U.S. Oregon fares better than the national average at 56.6 percent. Massachusetts has the highest six-year rate of students obtaining bachelor’s degrees: 68 percent, below the NCAA figure. What gives?
This is no fun. Jocks are supposed to be dumber than the playing fields on which they perform. They are supposed to grace their classes with their presences, not take notes. Sex, race, orientation and economic background aren’t supposed to take away from the notion that jocks only care about papers with their names on them when signing professional contracts. Granted, professional opportunities are not available in every sport, and very few pros make it big, but to go away from the general expectation and attitude in such a brazen manner makes that figure of 79 percent seem made up. The old adage that 86 percent of statistics are made up on the spot figures in heavily.
I guess that the idea of the “student-athlete” may not be dead yet, even among the nation’s most popular (and financially prosperous) sports. But what good is it to acknowledge that?
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