College sports madness

I love the NCAA men's basketball tournament as much, if not more than, the next guy, but I agree with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's idea to require teams to graduate at least 40 percent of its players to be eligible to compete in the tournament.

As Duncan said, 40 percent is "a low bar," it's not even close to a passing grade, but 12 of the 64 teams in this year's tourney would not have qualified.

The dumb asses at top-seeded Yucky-Kentucky only graduated 31 percent of its players. The other teams under the 40-percent dumbass threshold are: Maryland (8 percent graduation rate), California (20 percent), Arkansas-Pine Bluff (29 percent), Washington (29 percent), Tennessee (30 percent), Baylor (36 percent), Missouri (36 percent), New Mexico State (36 percent), Clemson (37 percent), Georgia Tech (38 percent) and Louisville (38 percent).

Dumbass Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl, threw a hissy fit about Duncan's idea, saying "I don't mind reminding the secretary that one of the greatest disservices that take place in our country is the difference in secondary education," Pearl said. "If you want to fix it, fix it at the high school level, at the middle school level, at the elementary school level."

No doubt, Bruce, our schools are in trouble all the way around, and athletes get a free pass in their secondary years to stay eligible and get a scholarship to college.

But you know what? If college coaches and their universities were held accountable for getting their "student"-athletes to graduate, maybe they'd be less willing to take a chance on a kid who can't make it the classroom. Then, if college coaches were less willing to take chances on kids who can't make it in the classroom, maybe the athletes, their high school and middle school teachers and coaches, and quite possibly their parents, would see to it that they were at least passable students.

And if you're a highly compensated college basketball coach who's paid to win, get in the tournament and expose your program and school to the world, you might take a little extra care to ensure your players are in class, majoring in something, anything, and making progress toward receiving some sort of degree that they can use when they don't get drafted by the NBA and they drop out of the Jordanian Professional Basketball Association after a single season.

Of course, as with all things involving college sports, any change would create great drama and debate. Would you count players who move on to the NBA as failing to graduate? According to this AP story, the numbers cited by Duncan do not penalize the schools for athletes who transfer or move on to the NBA if they were in "good academic standing" when they left.

The same AP story says, "an NCAA spokesman said the sports governing body shares Duncan's concern about low graduation rates of some tournament teams. But he said the NCAA believes a ban based on graduation rates wrongly penalizes current student-athletes for the academic performances of those who entered as freshman eight to 11 years ago."

Typical. No one asking anybody to penalize the current athletes. Penalize the coaches, athletic directors and universities who will allow this to continue another eight to 11 years from now if the NCAA doesn't step up to do something about. They need to institute the rule effective five years from now and stand back and watch the schools and programs scramble to meet the deadline.

Imagine how great it would be if ESPN and sports talk radio had to cover graduation rates and classroom performance when breaking down bubble teams. Wouldn't it be cool if the in-game graphics showing a coach's stats against ranked opponents also listed his graduation rate?

Unfortunately, if the NCAA were ever to make a change and actually care about the education of its athletes in the big-money sports, it would probably just inspire the coaches to find better ways to cheat the system. I'm sure John Calipari has some great ideas already.

Here's the link to the complete study of graduation rates among the men's and women's tournament teams.