Faculty Athletic Representatives Roused into Action?

Yes, occasionally the NCAA proposes something so outrageous, in this case softening academic demands on men's basketball programs, that it happens, as reported by Doug Lederman at Inside Higher Ed:

“The general feeling [of faculty athletics representatives] is that some of what’s in the early stages of the document takes the approach of fixing the APR by tinkering with the matrix instead of getting substantively at why the APR is low in the first place,” said Josephine R. Potuto, the Richard H. Larson Professor of Constitutional Law and faculty representative at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, who heads a group of faculty representatives from NCAA Division I-A universities that wrote to NCAA leaders last week. “The predominant if not exclusive focus should be on the root causes, not on the APR.” . . .

Faculty athletics representatives from the Pacific-10 Conference, in a November 3 letter to Myles Brand and Dan Guerrero, the athletics director at the University of California at Los Angeles who heads the basketball academic enhancement group, said the problem isn’t that basketball players as a group are less academically prepared, but that the players many Division I colleges have historically chosen to recruit and admit are less prepared for academic success.

“Now, faced with academic penalties as a consequence of such recruitment practices, these programs seek to blame the students they recruited for the lack of success they have experienced,” the Pac-10 faculty leaders write. “[W]e are concerned that this opening statement ... is really meant to provide a justification for recommendations ... that would reduce the impact of the NCAA’s Academic Performance Program ... on men’s basketball.” . . .

The basketball working group’s report does offer several substantive proposals aimed at bolstering the academic performance of basketball players once they’re in college, including performing adequately in several credit hours of required summer school.

But its report focuses heavily on a set of changes that would limit the pain that teams feel when their players fail to make progress toward a degree. One would grant exceptions so that teams would not be punished under the Academic Progress Rate when athletes leave a college because of a coaching change. Another would give teams an extra point when a player graduates early (perhaps making up for points they’ve lost because players haven’t graduated at all). Yet another would provide more leeway (some if already granted) if players leave college early to go pro.

In other words, the proposals would serve to further enable behavior which, with the exception of quick graduation, the NCAA should be discouraging. Progression please Myles, not regression.

Links to USA Today Special Report

There was an excellent series of reports at USA today last week on the demands, stresses, and problems inherent in intercollegiate athletics. This sort of journalism validates the necessity of and active press - there is only so much that a blogger can accomplish. Read away!

College athletes studies guided towards 'major in elibigility'

My comments here.

Same team, same major

This illustrates the widespread existence of major clusters, which the NCAA used to claim were not widespread, and now claim are not a problem.

'You could consider football a full-time job'

This story, and the accompanying video, follows a day in the life of model STUDENT-athlete and Illinois center Ryan McDonald.

Athletes' academic choices put advisers in tough balancing act

This story exposes the problems in the academic advising system for athletes. It would not be so much of a problem if most advisers did not report to the Athletic Director. . .

UNLV athletes question degrees in university studies

Some Universities are issuing degrees which their recipients are embarrassed of. YIKES!

"A major in eligibility, with a minor in beating the system"

This sums up the academic atmosphere for all too many NCAA student-athletes today, as exposed in some excellent investigative journalism by USA Today. The entire series of articles is in the must-read category. Here are some of the most telling passages from the central piece:

Steven Cline left Kansas State University last spring with memories of two years as a starting defensive lineman for a major-college football team. He left with a diploma, credits toward a master's degree and a place on the 2007 Big 12 Conference all-academic team.

He also left with regrets about accomplishing all of this by majoring in social sciences — a program that drew 34% of the football team's juniors and seniors last season, compared with about 4% of all juniors and seniors at Kansas State. Cline says he found not-so-demanding courses that helped him have success in the classroom and on the field but did little for his dream of becoming a veterinarian. . . .

His experience reflects how the NCAA's toughening of academic requirements for athletes has helped create an environment in which they are more likely to graduate than other students — but also more likely to be clustered in programs without the academic demands most students face.

Some athletes say they have pursued — or have been steered to — degree programs that helped keep them eligible for sports but didn't prepare them for post-sports careers.

"A major in eligibility, with a minor in beating the system," says C. Keith Harrison, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida, where he is associate director of the Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports.

Note that NCAA President Myles Brand wrote quite recently:

Across the spectrum of Division I, there is little evidence of "clustering," or disproportionate numbers of student-athletes in certain majors.

Let me be clear! You can find examples of football or men's basketball programs with unacceptably low graduation rates. You can also find teams where unexplainably large numbers of football or men's basketball athletes are clustered in certain majors.

The USA Today report explodes Brand's talking point:

A USA TODAY study of the majors of juniors and seniors in five prominent sports at 142 of the NCAA's top-level schools shows athletes at many institutions clustering in certain majors, in some cases at rates highly disproportionate to those of all students.

The study involved the fall 2007 student rolls and the 2007-08 rosters for Division I teams in five sports — football, men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball and softball.

All 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) were included, as were 22 other Division I schools with standout men's or women's basketball teams. Nearly 9,300 athletes across 654 teams were covered by the study. Among the findings:

•83% of the schools (118 of 142) had at least one team in which at least 25% of the juniors and seniors majored in the same thing. For example, seven of the 19 players on Stanford's baseball team majored in sociology.

•34% of the teams (222 of 654) had at least one such cluster of student-athletes.

•More than half of the clusters are what some analysts refer to as "extreme," in which at least 40% of athletes on a team are in the same major (125 of 235). All seven of the juniors and seniors on Texas-El Paso's men's basketball team majored in multidisciplinary studies, for example. . . .

Brand's response?

"Clustering by itself is replicated in many parts of the university. It's not necessarily bad," NCAA President Myles Brand says.

Ah, what an excellent rhetorical shift Myles. When the evidence shows that it is a widespread issue, just claim that it is not a problem. Or, sort of a problem. Maybe:

"But when you have extreme clustering … you really do have to ask some hard questions: Is there an adviser who's pushing students into this? Are there some faculty members who are too friendly with student-athletes? I'm not saying that's the case. But I think you have to ask those questions."

The NCAA is going to get on this immediately. Right?

Brand adds that it's up to each school to do so. "There are limits to what the national office can, and should, do," he says. "Anything to do with the academic programs really falls entirely within the purview of the individual institutions." . . .

Silly me for asking the question - way to pass the buck Myles. Where are the students left in all of this?

"There's a mixed message being sent out here" about the importance of academics in college sports, Georgia Tech men's basketball coach Paul Hewitt said in June before the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

Several athletes echo Hewitt's sentiments.

Former Boise State safety Marty Tadman was among the 48% of the football team's juniors and seniors majoring in communication during the 2007-08 academic year. Boise State's communication program also drew 50% of the juniors and seniors on the men's basketball and women's basketball teams.

"You hear which majors, and which classes, are the easiest and you take them," Tadman says. "You're going to school so you can stay in sports. You're not going for a degree. … It's a joke." . . .

This is, in part, a consequence of the law of unintended consequences:

There also is a new NCAA rule that threatens penalties for teams with too many players who become academically ineligible or fail to graduate. Based on their annually published Academic Progress Rate (APR), teams can lose scholarships and eventually become ineligible for postseason play, either of which can embarrass a school and affect a team's ability to win.

Hewitt, the Georgia Tech men's basketball coach, bluntly articulated many coaches' view of the "unintended consequences" of the APR system at the Knight Commission meeting in June. He said then that when an NCAA official came to the Atlantic Coast Conference meetings four years ago to discuss the APR system, "almost every coach said: 'You understand what you're basically telling us. We're going to encourage our kids to take the easiest path to eligibility.'

"So if I'm at a Georgia Tech, I'm not going to tell a young man he can't major in engineering," Hewitt said. "But I certainly will counsel him before he takes that first class that … if you decide to go down this road and for some reason you find it harder than you expected and you decide to change your major, you're probably more than likely going to end up being ineligible" for sports.

Why not recruit more players with the capacity to both major in engineering and play basketball? Its not like they are not out there. The truth is that they would do nothing for Hewitt's job security. This will remain the case so long as coaches are rewarded for teams successful in competition but incompetent in the classroom, but get fired for graduating players at high rates while posting mediocre records.

Medical Travails; FSU's Brave New World

Georgia Tech guard D'Andre Bell is out for the season:

Senior starter D’Andre Bell said he was always taught to have a Plan A, B, C and D.

“Plan A seems to be put on hold,” the 6-foot-6 wing said Wednesday. “Now I’m going to reach for Plan B.”

Tech announced Wednesday that a condition called spinal stenosis will keep Bell from playing this season.

Diving for a loose ball during an Oct. 10 conditioning workout, Bell’s head collided with Zachery Peacock’s leg. Bell felt numbness, then tingling in his extremities.

An examination by Dr. John Heller, a spine surgeon at the Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Center, revealed Bell had an abnormal narrowing, or stenosis, in the cervical portion of his spine.

It’s a condition in which the spinal canal narrows and compresses the spinal cord. Bell needs surgery, whether or not he wants to play basketball again, and plans to have the operation over winter break.

“It’s truly a blessing that we found it,” Bell said. “I’m looking at my situation from all the positive angles, and I’m just going to play the cards that I’ve been dealt.”

Best wishes to D'Andre on a successful surgery and a full and quick recovery.

Santa Clara forward John Bryant is recovering well from a stabbing incident on September 27:

"I'm back to 100 percent right now," Bryant said. "I have a couple of scars, nothing big. It's not bad."

During the first weekend of school, Bryant and a few friends left a party and exchanged words with three men. One of the men knocked Bryant to the ground and another came at him from behind and stabbed him. He was knifed twice on the right side of his lower back and once on the left—with three inch-long scars to show for it. He needed 14 stitches to close the wounds.

"He was talking and we said, 'We don't want to mess with you' and started walking away," Bryant said. "He's not a good character. You could just tell. Wrong place, wrong time."

Bryant considers himself fortunate—and he said he's learned a lesson about not putting himself in situations where bad things could happen. He knows this could have turned out much worse or even been life-threatening.

"You reach to your back and there's all that blood and you wonder what's going on. I was a little scared," he said. "I was lucky not having any internal injuries. It just really put things in perspective. The coaches are always talking about being in the right place at the right time."

The suspect in the case was arrested for armed robbery soon after the incident:

Santa Clara police arrested Jose Domingo Segovia, 18, of Santa Clara on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the stabbing of John Bryant, a star center on the men's basketball team. . . .

Early Saturday, police received reports that four Santa Clara students had been robbed at knife point in the 500 block of Washington Street, just a few blocks off campus. As officers responded to the scene, they spotted the suspects' vehicle, a 2002 gold Hyundai, and attempted to stop the men. The suspects abandoned the car and tried to escape on foot, according to police Lt. Mike Sellers.

Officers set up a perimeter and began receiving calls from neighbors about people hiding in their back yard. Police found two of the men hiding in a yard; they later identified and arrested Segovia as the third suspect in the robbery.

Florida State wide receiver Bert Reed has been suspended for Saturday's game - for violating FSU's policy on class attendance (!!!):

After Wednesday's practice, Bowden said: "Bert Reed, to save a lot of speculation, is suspended because of missing classes.

"I'm afraid some people were making too much out of it, making it into something else. It's missing classes."

Reed was disciplined under a more strict athletic department policy put in place at the request of FSU President T.K. Wetherell because of what he views as high absenteeism.

A student-athlete with "three unexcused absences in any course" will be ineligible to play in one game. Four unexcused absences will result in missing 30 percent of that season's competition.

Is FSU truly entering a Brave New World of academic accountability? One can only hope. . .

Myles Brand and Newspeak

"The NCAA is at war with academic underachievement. The NCAA has always been at war with academic underachievement."

No, Myles Brand did not say that. But that was the first thing that came to mind when he issued his latest self-congratulatory missive on academic reform and student-athlete graduation rates. Although Dr. Brand does not have a history of taking criticism well, here is my response:

What are you going to believe...myth or the facts?

Do you want to continue believing the popular myth, the false perception, the uninformed bias that student-athletes as a lot are dumb jocks?

This is a classic straw man argument Myles. 'Dumb Jock' is your term. What critics are employing it?

Or do you want to believe the data that say student-athletes are, on average, graduating at higher rates from college than other students?

As I have noted before this is the truth. And it is a good story. Stick with it, but also do us all a favor and be open about the failures in NCAA athletics rather than white-washing them.

Last week, I wrote about the dumb jock myth. It has been around a long time. It pervades popular culture about the academic status of student-athletes. From the Broadway musical Good News in 1927 to Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons in 2005, the perception persists that college athletes - especially football players and male basketball players - are coming to campus only to play sports and avoid classrooms.

The perception exists because it is partly true. Admit it and address it. Don't ignore it.

Commenting on last week's blog entitled "The 'Dumb Jock' Myth is Dumb," craigjjs wrote, "Right, the jocks are all Rhodes Scholars. Let's hear the stats for the major sports."

Okay, here are the facts when you look at the graduation rates released earlier this week. These are the rates that include the success and failure of transfer student-athletes (which the federal rates simply ignore as academic dropouts and undercount by more than 37,000 students annually).

But IGNORE students who leave eligible, but do not transfer. "The GSR also allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained." Tell us Myles, what was the fate of the 18,655 students who, according to your own numbers, 'Left Eligible'? So long as they are excluded from your calculations the Graduation Success Rate will be no such thing. Unless, that is, you are a 1984 fan. Given this flaw, the statistics rolled out here are as meaningful as Stalinist production quotas:

For the freshmen football student-athletes in the Football Bowl Championship institutions (the ones who draw the most attention and the largest revenue producers) who entered in 2001, the graduation rate is 66 percent. Two-thirds of all football players graduate in six years (the same time span the federal government uses for all students).

Basketball student-athletes who were part of the same cohort at the same institutions graduated at 65 percent, one percentage point lower.

When you look at the entire class of freshmen from the 2001 cohort, the rate is 79 percent. Nearly eight of every 10 student-athletes earn a degree in six years. And every demographic is doing better than their counterparts in the student body (as measured by the federal calculation) except for white males who trail by two percentage points.

All of these numbers have been trending upward over the last six years. If, as I noted last week, you count student-athletes who return to school over a 10 year period, the graduation rate is 88 percent, almost nine of 10!

What is the graduation rate for all students over ten years? What is the graduation rate for all students under the GSR method? Your statistics are meaningless without a point of comparison.

So what, craigjjs contends. "You forgot to compare the majors when you cooked up your statistics. I would guess that the 'recreational science' and similar majors tend to receive higher grades and find graduating a bit easier than those of the serious students."

We had the same concern, so we looked at majors for Division I student-athletes in 2004. Student-athletes were underrepresented by about four percent compared to all other students in the humanities and by about 9 percent in sciences. They were overrepresented compared to all other students by about five percent in social sciences and three percent in business. Both groups were about the same in education majors.

Interesting information, but your analysis is begging. In fact it is nonexistent.

Across the spectrum of Division I, there is little evidence of "clustering," or disproportionate numbers of student-athletes in certain majors.

Let me be clear! You can find examples of football or men's basketball programs with unacceptably low graduation rates. You can also find teams where unexplainably large numbers of football or men's basketball athletes are clustered in certain majors.

So are you going to do anything about it? Will you, for example, address the General Studies Program at the University of Michigan?

But these examples are not the rule. They drive the myth. They are no more valid as a generalization than to argue that all student-athletes are great scholars, which some are.

Silly me for asking. I guess you are not going to anything about it except continue on your merry rhetorical way.

What we have seen during the last few years - and what we will see increasingly in the future - are trends that in time will have most teams in most sports at most institutions graduating above or well above the 60 percent threshold where other students on average graduate.

By what measure? Federal standards or your own confected numbers?

Why do we know this and what is the cause?

Caveat lector, self-congratulation ahead.

Four years ago, the presidents in Division I put in place the most comprehensive package of academic reforms ever in the history of college sports. The package had three key components:

* Higher standards--Entering freshmen had to present successful completion of 16 academic core courses in high school and a sliding-scale achievement on both grade-point average and standardized tests. Enrolled student-athletes had to make 20 percent progress each year toward a declared major (and one open to all students).

* Better metrics--We look at academic performance semester by semester to track whether members of a team are on course to graduate, and we examine the success or failure of all student-athletes, including transfers.

* Sanctions--Teams that fail to meet threshold requirements each year will lose scholarships and teams that fail to perform academically over time could lose additional scholarships, be withheld from post-season tournaments or even be decertified.

We've never taken such an approach before. There is no place for low-performing teams to run and hide. Next spring, the first post-season sanctions will be leveled against teams that show a pattern of academic underachieving and no improvement. If that fails to get the attention of coaches, athletics directors and presidents, the entire athletics program could be withheld from NCAA championships.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed by scholarship sanctions which can remove, at most, ten percent of the scholarships - which amounts to two basketball scholarships or nine football scholarships.

That's going to leave a mark.

Hardly. Especially when so many teams flunking by the NCAA's own standards are merely warned. Is the same approach going to be adopted where post-season eligibility is concerned?

Our goal from the outset has been to change behavior. We want student-athletes to get an education and graduate. We would rather reward improvement than punish low performance. But we are dead serious about better results.

If you are dead serious about better results, it is time to get dead serious about punishing low performance. Placing 100% rather than 10% of scholarships in jeopardy would be a good start.

The dumb jock myth has always been an unfortunate generalization that unfairly stigmatized the great majority of student-athletes, including the majority of football and male basketball athletes. And the academic reform effort currently underway makes it even more untrue.

So, what are you going to depend on now for your perception of college athletes as students...an uninformed bias that says all jocks are dumb or the undeniable data that shows on average student-athletes are doing as well or better than other students?

I am certainly not going to depend on YOUR data Myles; at the moment I have more trust in the government than I do in the NCAA.

It's a shame to let the facts get in the way of a good story, but they just don't support the myth that jocks are dumb.

Well done rhetorically Myles; begin and end with the straw man argument.

Soap Opera News; Random Misbehaviour; UD on Graduation Rates; D-Day for FSU

Oh, brother: Terry Bowden says Tommy didn't meet expectations

"So, did Tommy Bowden deserve what happened to him Monday? Unfortunately, yes," Terry Bowden wrote on Yahoo.com. "He deserved it because he, of all people, knew what to expect when he got into this business. We grew up in it.

"He knew what to expect when he went to Clemson. He knew that no matter where you go, there is an expectation of success that must be met. After nine years at Clemson, he knew exactly what those expectations were and he knew they had not been met."

Iowa coach Ferentz suspends son from all team activities

James Ferentz, a freshman offensive lineman, was cited by Iowa City Police for drinking underage early Friday morning.

In a statement, Kirk Ferentz said he was extremely disappointed with his son's behavior. He says his son is suspended from all team activities for an indefinite time and will also be required to attend counseling sessions and perform community service for the next six weeks.

G Fields, two freshman suspended indefinitely by Nevada

Nevada starting guard Brandon Fields and two incoming freshmen have been suspended from the basketball team indefinitely after being cited for misdemeanor petty larceny, Wolf Pack coach Mark Fox said Thursday.

London Giles, a 6-foot-3 guard from Dallas, and Ahyaro Phillips, a 6-8 forward from New Orleans, were suspended along with Fields after their release by Sparks police following an undisclosed incident on Wednesday, Fox said in a statement.

"I am extremely disappointed to learn of this situation," Fox said. "I do not know all of the facts right now and will not have any further comment until I have a better understanding of the situation."

What wonderful leadership from a returning starter. What wonderful leadership from their coach.

See the following posts by University Diaries on release of NCAA propaganda I mean graduation rates:

Snapshots from Home: Graduation Rates
San Diego State: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Notes from the Intellectual Desert
Scathing Online Schoolmarm
The University UD Calls. . .

Meanwhile, FSU faces the NCAA Infractions Committee today. There is a good wrap-up of the story here by Andrew Carter of the Orlando Sentinel, and he is doing his best to live-blog the action here.

NCAA Dishes Latest Propaganda; IHE Swallows

On one hand I am quite happy. As a group, NCAA student-athletes continue to graduate at a rate of 64%, 2% better than the general student populations. On the other, it is disgraceful that the NCAA continues to utilize confected measures like the GSR, or 'Graduation Success Rates' to propagandize its success. Overall, the story is good, but this sort of Salt Bath Writing* serves another purpose - allowing the NCAA to ignore its areas of abject failure, since as graduation rates in Football and Men's Basketball which remain under 50%. What really makes my blood boil, however, is journalism on the latest data-manipulation efforts by the NCAA which reads like an NCAA press release. Such is the case with this article, published today at Inside Higher Ed:

Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, wants to cease the propagation of “the so-called ‘dumb jock’ myth,” as he puts it. Trumpeting new data showing that NCAA Division I athletes are graduating at the highest rates ever — even as players in high-profile sports such as baseball, football and men’s and women’s basketball continue to lag — Brand and other NCAA officials argue that recently adopted and stricter academic accountability rules are steadily sidelining old stereotypes.

How about someone from outside the NCAA? Did you bother to interview them? If so, why are they not quoted in the article?

The NCAA reports graduation rates for Division I athletes in two ways — the Department of Education-developed federal rate and an NCAA-developed “Graduation Success Rate.” The GSR, as it is called, was developed by the NCAA to assess long-term academic success at the request of many member colleges who found the federal graduation rates misleading. Unlike the federal figure, the GSR does not penalize institutions for departing transfers who leave in good academic standing; it also counts incoming transfer students and midyear enrollees.

Of course then. It must all be good. The dirty little secret is that the GSR "allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained." In other words calling it a 'Graduation Success Rate' is Orwellian language at its best.

By counting these athletes, the GSR tracks about 28,000 more students than the 72,000 tracked by the federal graduation data. And since they take into account athletes who left their institutions in good standing, GSR percentages are higher than federal graduation rates in virtually all cases. Still, not all athletes who leave in good standing enter another institution. Todd Petr, NCAA managing director of research, said 90 percent of students in good standing who leave college transfer successfully to another institution.

Whoops, Todd let some of the fine print slip out. 90% 'Transfer Successfully', which does not, of course, mean that they graduate.

Both the federal and the NCAA metrics, however, determine their percentages based on the number of students who graduate within six years of entering college. . . .

Except that the GSR deliberately leaves some students out so the numbers can be inflated.

As the federal rate is the only method with which to compare athletes to other students — because no data comparable to the Graduation Success Rate exist — it shows that two percent more Division I athletes graduate in six years than the 62 percent national average for all students at Division I colleges and universities. . . .

At least the author of this article did not fall for comparing general student-body graduation rate with NCAA GSR data. That Apples to Oranges comparison is, of course, what the NCAA would like you to make.

“We are continuing to make progress on the aspirational goal, which I very much advocate, of an 80 percent GSR,” Brand said during a news conference in which he further detailed some of the statistical improvements in the seven years that the NCAA has used its own metric to determine graduation rates. “The ultimate success, though, is in the lives of the student-athletes themselves. Approximately 4,000 additional student-athletes graduated from college over the past six years because of these increased graduation rates and increased academic performance.” . . .

Myles Brand, why don't you make it an aspirational goal to achieve a graduation rate in all sports which is at least equal to the overall 62% graduation rate in the general student body? No need to answer. We know. That would undermine the revenue sports like Basketball and Football which ultimately pay your salary.


What all of this systematically ignores, however, are the immense advantages given to Student-Athletes. One wonders how well John and Jane Student would perform if they were given exclusive dorms, special refectories, access to free private tutoring, and were funneled into General Studies and Sports Management majors. A sight higher than 64% one would guess. Of course most student-athletes do not take those 'easy majors', but they are among the unfortunate friendly-fire casualties from the latest salvo of propaganda from the NCAA.

*See University Diaries for October 22, 2007

Are Jocks Necessary?

Asks columnist Lucy M. Caldwell at the Harvard Crimson:

From a practical fundraising standpoint, the answer may be yes—having a strong athletics program enhances development opportunities. . . .

Like Harvard needs a larger endowment. . .

Surprisingly, Harvard boasts the largest NCAA Division I athletics program in the country (larger than Stanford or any state school), and this is something in which many alumni take pride. The need for sports as a component of development is reinforced by historical memory from other colleges. In the forties, when Big Ten member University of Chicago dropped its football team and withdrew from the conference, donations to the college plunged. The school later reinstated its football team and became a Division III member of another NCAA conference. . . .

There’s another, less talked-about problem too. Athletes who feel a weaker connection to Harvard outside of sports are more likely to stay dedicated to their sport. Therefore, relying exclusively on recruiting the academically qualified is potentially problematic, since many of these students abandon their sport in college in order to pursue the endless non-athletic opportunities Harvard makes available.

The frequency with which the latter phenomenon occurs could suggest that the business of competitive college athletics is incompatible with a rigorous academic environment. Some argue that a reason to admit academically dubious athletes is that they tend to possess a deep discipline for their sport and this is grit we can learn from. Yet mediocre athletes can be highly disciplined too—athletic talent is not absolutely correlated with discipline for the sport. . . .

Indeed. I am a classic example, although it should be pointed out that it was that discipline which allowed me to survive and thrive in graduate school.

Finally, since Harvard commands a large endowment and a great ability to attract the most promising students, the University might use this moment as a way of trying to effect change in the college athletic culture. This is not to say that we should have no athletic program, merely that we should be happy with a mediocre one (that may become excellent organically). Perhaps paradoxically, by accepting mediocrity in this area, Harvard can resume striving for excellence in areas that matter more to us.

HERESY! Kudos to Lucy for having the courage to suggest it.

At Georgia, a Commitment to Academics?

Those are the noises coming out of the athletics department at the University of Georgia, which a fellow blogger has described as the Worst University in the United States. From Mark Schlabach at ESPN:

When Georgia hired Dennis Felton as its men's basketball coach five years ago, the school asked him to clean up its program, which had been ridiculed nationally because of academic fraud and NCAA violations committed under former coach Jim Harrick.

Felton cleaned up the program, so much so that the Bulldogs have mostly labored through a 13-15 season with only eight scholarship players. After Felton dismissed two starters before they even stepped on the court this season, Georgia lost 11 of its first 14 SEC games before winning at Auburn 59-54 on Wednesday night. . . .

Might Felton's house cleaning cost him his job?

"I promise you this: If I were to get fired, it would be for not winning enough games," Felton said Wednesday night. "It would not be for a lack of our guys consistently representing our university and our program with class." . . .

"I want to be successful in everything," [Georgia athletic director Damon] Evans said. "There are some sports I want to see us build upon. We are 110 percent committed to Georgia basketball. I think Georgia basketball should be great. Of course, we expect great things from basketball, just like we do from every sport."

Georgia's attrition is what concerns Evans most, according to people close to the situation. The Bulldogs have lost six players during the past two seasons. . . .

At least one college basketball coach suggested Georgia's new academic standards, which require student-athletes to attend dozens of tutoring, study hall and advisement sessions each month, make it too difficult to build a program that will consistently win.

"The job is too hard," said the coach, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "You can't find enough good players who are willing to do all of that."

But Evans, who instituted the policies last year to improve Georgia's lagging graduation rates, defended the new plan. Evans said Georgia's other athletic teams haven't struggled to adhere to the policies.

"First and foremost, we're about academics," Evans said. "Aren't we supposed to encourage our kids to go to class and do what they're supposed to be doing academically? We should be asking more of them academically, to be honest. We've had other teams at Georgia have success under the same guidelines. We want to graduate players from this institution and win basketball games." . . .

The Georgia fan base is already calling for Felton's head. If Evans truly is more committed to graduating basketball players that he is to winning, then one fears that his will be next on the chopping block.