Getting Benched

Jim Calhoun, head men’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut, had just won his 700th career game as a college coach last Wednesday, and the 10,000 fans at the sold-out Gampel Pavilion in Storrs, Conn., were going wild, waving placards that read “700.” Boosted by Calhoun and his two national titles, including last year’s championship, UConn is no longer a “cow college” between Hartford and nowhere. It’s a high-powered name, on TV every week during the season, with applications and donations booming. But of all the young men who have helped bring Calhoun glory over the past several years, just 27% graduated from the school.

Poor academic performance spreads far beyond UConn’s hoops program. Over the next few weeks, millions of fans will be wagering in office pools, trying to predict who will advance in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball tournament, a rite known as March Madness. Do you like Kentucky, with its 8% graduation rate, for the Sweet 16? Is Texas, at 27% like the Huskies, a match for them on the court too? Low achievement is plaguing not just revenue-generating sports like men’s basketball and football. Softball and golf teams have also lagged. Add classroom woes to the cheating, sex and even murder scandals that have rocked campuses like Ohio State, Colorado and Baylor over the past few years, and it’s clear that college sports need to get sent back to school.

Enter Myles Brand. The president of the NCAA unveiled last week the most aggressive athletic-reform measures in decades. For the first time, schools whose athletes don’t meet a new minimum academic standard–roughly equivalent to a 50% graduation rate–stand to lose scholarships and risk harsher sanctions down the road such as being barred from lucrative post-season play. The organization fired loud warning shots, posting report cards on its website that detail which specific teams face the biggest challenges (UConn basketball and Ohio State football among them) and giving them a year to shape up or risk scholarship losses.

Brand’s innovation is simple yet powerful: while athletic eligibility rules have long placed a burden on students to maintain minimum academic performance, this is the first time that teams would be penalized for lapses. The new rules have the potential to change the dynamics of college sports, starting as early as next year. “It’s going to force our coaches to take a look at the type of people they have in their program, and I think it will change how you recruit coaches,” says University of Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart. “We don’t want coaches who want a quick fix.”

Brand is trying to curb what many see as the exploitation of student athletes in an era when money for college sports is exploding. CBS pays the NCAA $6 billion for the rights to broadcast March Madness through 2014. That largesse is divided among all Division I schools, but the further you advance in the tournament, the more your conference, and thus your school, gets. Thanks to national championships at Syracuse and UConn the past two years, the NCAA will mail the Big East an $11.8 million check in April.

The coaches’ response to this commercial pressure has been to recruit the best athletes possible, not necessarily the most academically qualified. Although student athletes who struggle in class can usually get special tutoring, teams don’t always stay vigilant after the sports season ends–and often pull their scholarships from those who lose athletic eligibility. After all, there’s always a new class of freshman recruits to take the places of dropouts.

Although Brand preaches reform, the college-sports spectacle keeps expanding. A second 24-hour college-sports network, ESPNU, debuted on Friday, joining the two-year-old College Sports Television channel as a business trying to profit off of college games. Like CSTV, ESPNU will show minor sports like softball and swimming as well as football and basketball. “How much credibility can you assign to the NCAA when it’s ratcheting up commercial interests?” asks Ellen Staurowsky, an Ithaca College sports-management professor and former college coach. Responds Brand: “These networks are allowing other participants to be on TV. It’s a chance to celebrate the student athlete.”

Others believe the NCAA should simply treat athletes as professionals. “Let’s take away the sham,” says Linda Bensel-Meyers, a University of Denver English professor and head of the Drake Group, an athletic-reform coalition. She says that since big-time athletes are revenue-producing assets for the school, teams should become subsidiaries, and players paid university employees rather than students. Bensel-Meyers, who received death threats while trying to expose academic corruption at the University of Tennessee in the late 1990s, says she still gets obscene phone calls because of her stances. Other Drake Group members have offered less radical proposals, such as revoking freshman eligibility, which would give incoming students a year to focus on school.

Even the NCAA’s harshest critics applaud Brand, who took over the organization two years ago after a feud with volatile basketball coach Bob Knight thrust him into the spotlight. As president of Indiana University in 2000, Brand fired Knight after the coach, among other indiscretions, was caught on video grabbing a player’s neck. As the first NCAA president pulled from academia, Brand has united university presidents behind his causes. For example, after news broke that Colorado football players allegedly threw sex parties to lure high school recruits, Brand quickly pushed through new regulations designed to eliminate the “culture of entitlement” in the recruiting process. “He doesn’t take [expletive] from anyone, and that certainly helps in this job,” says former I.U. English professor Murray Sperber, a noted NCAA foe who also sparred with Brand in Bloomington. “He has a sense of himself that previous directors just didn’t have.”

The problem, NCAA watchdogs say, is that Brand might be touting reforms that devalue education. Now that a school faces penalties if student athletes are ineligible, there’s even more incentive for coaches to bully faculty into changing grades or creating simpleton courses. At the University of Georgia, for example, basketball players took a class called Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball. An exam question asked the value of a three-point shot. “Athletes won’t just be tempted to take Basket Weaving I,” says Sperber. “They’ll be tempted to take Basket Weaving II, III and IV.” Brand is putting the burden on the schools to keep up academic standards. “We cannot be the parent and policeman on every corner,” he says. But he will be reading report cards. UConn, the ball is in your court. –With reporting by Greg Fulton/Atlanta

A Smart 16?

If the top men’s college hoops teams let academics settle the score, powerhouses like Arizona, Oklahoma State and Kentucky would get easily outclassed

Current A.P. Ranking (Graduation Rate)*

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]

Â

Â