The one thing I do get furious about is that you can't use the 2011 team as a symbol of what's wrong with the system or college sports in general - last year's upperclassmen (Kemba, Donnell Beverly and Charles Okwandu) graduated. Everyone else is/was doing fine academically, based on current APR scores, with the possible exception of Jamal Coombs-McDaniel and the points he cost us when he transferred. So don't you dare taint the accomplishment of those kids based on what people before them did.
The 2009 Final Four team? OK - that falls smack dab in the middle of our problem years. But let's look closely. Kemba, Beverly and Okwandu graduated - so did Dyson and Austrie. Robinson (7), Price (6) and Thabeet (6) were not in school for the full eight semesters (Price maybe had 7, if he came back to school the spring after his brain surgery, but if he did it was a very light courseload). But depending on what Thabeet did academically after he declared, all three might be heavy points against us. Gavin was reportedly close, but fell short. Not sure about Adrien - I suppose if our numbers are that bad, then odds are he didn't, but he made it to the NBA as a marginal prospect, so any time he took off school at the end to focus on workouts, etc. paid off for him (my apologies if he did graduate). There was also Miles, Majok and Haralson from that team, who weren't around long enough to pick a major. And the ill-fated Mandeldove Project fits in there somewhere.
Graduation rates have always been terrible for us because of retention - the end of our bench has been a revolving door and the one part of our program that I really have never liked. We never get the happy towel wavers who graduate - we get guys who can't cut crack the rotation and farm them out to mid-majors before taking flyers on some new guys on the end of the bench (out with Haralson, in with Trice, etc.).
And not for nothing - if Jonathan Mandeldove is the figurehead for the academic problems at UConn, you can't exactly use a "win-at-all-costs" cliche. Even if he was a train wreck of a student, he still had more textbooks than points in his UConn career.