The Real Issue

[cohenzone]

Okay, so the NCAA is a bunch of farty bags and UConn is being screwed. And I am not against UConn pursuing this further on equitable grounds. But until the real issue is seen as an issue, not just a fact of life, there is going to be an on-going situation, one that has been in existence for a very long time, regarding what some universities do to play the system to keep athletes qualified. I'd guess the preponderance of colleges, at least at the level above DII, regularly admit kids who do not meet their normal academic standards, even if those standards are above the minimum for NCAA eligibility. Or they keep kids qualified by some slight of hand. It's all about the money, always has been, always will be.

If the schools did not drop their standards AND did not allow for unusual curricula for the athletes or other special treatment, I might even argue that the NCAA should have no business at all dealing with graduation rates and the like. If an athlete, because of the demands of the sport has trouble keeping up, the school absolutely should have support systems in place to help the student, as they usually do for any student. But if they fail, that should be the student's affair and the impact of that failure on the program should be whatever it is without the NCAA chiming in. If an athlete is college material, there is a college they actually qualify for somewhere, be it a community college, or school that normally takes kids who aren't at least in the top 50% of their high school class. It would be no shame for the world if one of those schools occasionally had the best team in the country.

Obviously, not every kid who UConn or other big time sports schools takes in who look like an academic risk winds up having problems, nor do kids whose high school academics meet the usual admission requirements necessarily have clear sailing, just like many other students. But I think the NCAA's concern, be it, as Upstater argues, only for PR purposes, or more pure than that, has some foundation, conscious or not, that is rooted in the basic corruption of the normal academics. During my years at UConn in the mid 1960's at least one basketball player each year flunked off the team. Other than disappointment on the part of the student, the team and the fans, it was viewed as a normal part of college life and the NCAA wasn't even thought of as a source of additional problems for the program. In case anyone thinks the schools were necessarily any more demanding back then, there was a famous SI interview of great linebacker Dick Butkus when he was in college at Illinois. Here is an excerpt (bless Google, because the quote is slightly different from what I remembered):

"I had a lot of offers," he says, inoffensively. "But I didn't never really consider any of 'em except Illinois. Northwestern was...well, they ain't my kind of people. Notre Dame looked too hard. Besides, they didn't like the idea of my getting married, which I knew I was gonna do."
With casual honesty Butkus admits he is no honor student. "If I was smart enough to be a doctor, I'd be a doctor," he shrugs. "I ain't, so I'm a football player. They got me in PE."

He also admitted that he struggled to get to class. He never lost eligibility. I suppose that there is some good in making the schools a little bit afraid of the NCAA.

 

[upstater]

The NCAA is the schools.

That's the problem.

That's why this is a PR ploy. Pure? The whole question of the student-athlete is easy to solve. I've written about this extensively on this board already.

I simply encourage people to read the APR rules and especially the totally ludicrous GSR assessment, and then come back with a straight face and talk about purity. If the NCAA were at all concerned about students, it could solve this problem in the next 10 minutes. As Jay Bilas said, and he was right, what they've done is made things worse.

 

[HuskyBandDad]

Bottom line is you need to punish only the player if he screwed up - not the whole team. Do just what Cuse did with Fab Melo. You do need some rules that the school must follow to keep every kid out of trouble but this APR is crazy. I do not have a big problem with losing scholarships if you can not maintain a minimum academic level.

 

[upstater]

Bottom line is you need to punish only the player if he screwed up - not the whole team. Do just what Cuse did with Fab Melo. You do need some rules that the school must follow to keep every kid out of trouble but this APR is crazy. I do not have a big problem with losing scholarships if you can not maintain a minimum academic level.

If the kid leaves school, how do you punish him?

Up admission standards, force schools to honor multiyear scholarships with the scholarship itself not immediately renewable if a player leaves. After that, eliminate all the NCAA oversight, because you won't need it.

But the NCAA bureaucrats take $300 million of every $700 million payday (yes, I know much of it goes toward putting on the championships for all sports), but that bureaucracy needs a reason for being, and the more rules and regulations they develop (especially the idiotic reductive ones like GSR and aPR) the more they feed on it.

 

[cohenzone]

The question of the "student athlete" becomes a question at all only because of the money it means to a school. How many great musicians does a university drop its standards for to admit or keep qualified in school? If "student-athlete" is seen as a "problem" requiring special treatment, I have a very easy way to solve it. Totally ban recruiting. Basically, if you are lucky enough to have a great athlete apply to your school, terrific. Any school found in violation is banned for, say ten years, from post-season. Street agents would have to find some other slimy thing to do. Okay, so that ain't gonna happen.

I'm advocating essentially no NCAA role on continuing eligibility if the universities were to stop gimmicking their own systems. The NCAA may be made up of the universities, but it is not equivalent to the universities. The bar associations may be made up of all of the attorneys, but the ethics committees do their own thing. You can always argue that anything that looks like self-regulation is only PR, but it does not mean that that the rules have no reason. But, I don't disagree with you at all that most of these attempts at forcing schools to make the "student" part of "student-athlete" are at best disingenuous. If ethics were understood to mean the same thing universally and if it were reliable that all attorneys were ethical all the time, then bar associations would not need ethics committees. But,sadly, some lawyers have ethical issues, so the associations self-police and it certainly is not bad PR to self-police.

So long as some universities want to game the "student" part, there will be no trust among the institutions and so the NCAA will thrash about trying this or that remedy to force what the universities can't be trusted to do on their own. The APR system is not a very good one, and even if it were, there should be an obvious problem with new sanctions being applied to pre-existing violations. But I believe that unless one either wants on the one hand, to let the schools do whatever they want and that progress and/or graduation means nothing at all, or on the other hand, have a truly Draconian system like no recruiting at all, the organization will be seeking ways to keep all members up to some standard that they think gives some appearance that they all are playing by the same rules regarding who is a "student" and not just an "athlete". What the best method is I don't know, but it is not wrong for the NCAA to make some effort to have a system that doesn't make the term "student-athlete" just a slogan. And of course this ignores related issue of stipends or other compensation that would rid the sport of some of the monetary temptations if not the lack of pure amateurism.

 

[suzyq]

With all the assistance lined up for these kids , there is really no reason ( except intellectual inablilty) for them to not maintain the grades they need. I'm not saying it's easy with the schedules they have , but there is support readily available. It would be nice if coaches had the balls to sit a kid , for example if he misses a tutoring session. And not for the first four minutes, the whole game. They live and breathe PT, so use that.

 

[HuskyBandDad]

If the kid leaves school, how do you punish him?

Up admission standards, force schools to honor multiyear scholarships with the scholarship itself not immediately renewable if a player leaves. After that, eliminate all the NCAA oversight, because you won't need it.

But the NCAA bureaucrats take $300 million of every $700 million payday (yes, I know much of it goes toward putting on the championships for all sports), but that bureaucracy needs a reason for being, and the more rules and regulations they develop (especially the idiotic reductive ones like GSR and aPR) the more they feed on it.

Can not do much if kids leave. Agree with you about NCAA

 

[CL82]

If the kid leaves school, how do you punish him?

Up admission standards, force schools to honor multiyear scholarships with the scholarship itself not immediately renewable if a player leaves. After that, eliminate all the NCAA oversight, because you won't need it.

But the NCAA bureaucrats take $300 million of every $700 million payday (yes, I know much of it goes toward putting on the championships for all sports), but that bureaucracy needs a reason for being, and the more rules and regulations they develop (especially the idiotic reductive ones like GSR and aPR) the more they feed on it.

Scholarships are annual, not muli-year.
I agree that if you want to "fix" this "problem" just up the admission standards. The trouble with that approach is that it really is exclusionary. A collateral benefit of scholarship athletics is that it offers kids who might not have been able to attend college, either athletically or academically, a chance to attend. This "fix" would leave some kids behind.

If you are really trying to protect the student athlete for exploitation build a system that does that. Keep minimum academic standards in place in order for the athlete to be eligible to play; allow transfers without penalty; allow a limited number or early departures for pro sports for any other departure without graduation, prevent the school from replacing the student athlete until the original athlete would have exhausted his eligibility without regard to redshirt year. The player gets to compete and gets an education and all these byzantine APR and GSR rules get relegated to the ash heap of history.

 

[upstater]

The question of the "student athlete" becomes a question at all only because of the money it means to a school. How many great musicians does a university drop its standards for to admit or keep qualified in school? If "student-athlete" is seen as a "problem" requiring special treatment, I have a very easy way to solve it. Totally ban recruiting. Basically, if you are lucky enough to have a great athlete apply to your school, terrific. Any school found in violation is banned for, say ten years, from post-season. Street agents would have to find some other slimy thing to do. Okay, so that ain't gonna happen

I don't think it's the money. It's the alumni. The money, for the few schools that make it, is meager. The rest are subsidizing programs and athletes. But the sports programs are sacred cows, can't be touched even at places like Rutgers that get sucked into the vortex.

I'm advocating essentially no NCAA role on continuing eligibility if the universities were to stop gimmicking their own systems. The NCAA may be made up of the universities, but it is not equivalent to the universities. The bar associations may be made up of all of the attorneys, but the ethics committees do their own thing. You can always argue that anything that looks like self-regulation is only PR, but it does not mean that that the rules have no reason. But, I don't disagree with you at all that most of these attempts at forcing schools to make the "student" part of "student-athlete" are at best disingenuous. If ethics were understood to mean the same thing universally and if it were reliable that all attorneys were ethical all the time, then bar associations would not need ethics committees. But,sadly, some lawyers have ethical issues, so the associations self-police and it certainly is not bad PR to self-police.

I've never been against regulations. I've been against anti-educational regulations.

So long as some universities want to game the "student" part, there will be no trust among the institutions and so the NCAA will thrash about trying this or that remedy to force what the universities can't be trusted to do on their own. The APR system is not a very good one, and even if it were, there should be an obvious problem with new sanctions being applied to pre-existing violations. But I believe that unless one either wants on the one hand, to let the schools do whatever they want and that progress and/or graduation means nothing at all, or on the other hand, have a truly Draconian system like no recruiting at all, the organization will be seeking ways to keep all members up to some standard that they think gives some appearance that they all are playing by the same rules regarding who is a "student" and not just an "athlete". What the best method is I don't know, but it is not wrong for the NCAA to make some effort to have a system that doesn't make the term "student-athlete" just a slogan. And of course this ignores related issue of stipends or other compensation that would rid the sport of some of the monetary temptations if not the lack of pure amateurism.

I've mentioned earlier several things you can do to up standards that would not require much regulation even. So, I don't see this as getting rid of recruiting versus sticking with the aPR.

 

[upstater]

Scholarships are annual, not muli-year.
I agree that if you want to "fix" this "problem" just up the admission standards. The trouble with that approach is that it really is exclusionary. A collateral benefit of scholarship athletics is that it offers kids who might not have been able to attend college, either athletically or academically, a chance to attend. This "fix" would leave some kids behind.

Schools are oversubscribed. How can a kid get left behind when someone else takes his place, someone who would have been otherwise excluded?

 

[djct1999]

The real issue is that Uconn was already docked 2 scholarships for their bad apr. UConn was not the first high major to have that happen to. I would argue its almost more fair to ban everyone(syracuse included) who has ever lost scholarships over poor grades. To simply go back to 2009-10 is a clear example of the NCAA isolating UConn and going directly after one coach and program. That, to me, is the real issue.

 

[cohenzone]

I don't think it's the money. It's the alumni. The money, for the few schools that make it, is meager. The rest are subsidizing programs and athletes. But the sports programs are sacred cows, can't be touched even at places like Rutgers that get sucked into the vortex."

It is a combination of many things, and I wouldn't discount the money that readily, but the sacred cow thing is interesting and I don't disagree. People do live and die (sometimes for real) by their teams. With respect to "boosterism", the alums and other hangers on who shell out big bucks to support a program and sometimes break the rules, how involved would any of them be in that way if they didn't have some expectation of a high level of success for the program, the kind of expectations that lead some schools to bend the academic standards. I wonder - I haven't a clue - how involved the alumni are with enticing athletes to schools that are not likely to be on a big stage.

The reality is that the world would get along just fine without college varsity sports. Some schools are getting rid of some sports for various budgetary reasons, and not all of them are related to Title IX compliance. The U of Chicago, which was an original member of the Big 10 I believe, got rid of varsity sports a long time ago and as the saying goes, it ain't hurt their reputation none. Probably helped. Is BC any less of a school without basketball? Sorry, couldn't resist. But there are plenty of other ways for people to entertain themselves.

 

[upstater]

Even at U Texas the money isn't what it's cracked up to be, not when the school owes $250 million for the buildout. Oklahoma St., the same thing. When President Else Benitez at Texas A&M was told at the last minute (end of year) that athletics would have a $18 million shortfall which the school hadn't accounted for in the general budget, she told the AD that they would simply fill that black hole with funds from the coming year. She was out on her ear quickly after that. I see it my school where budget have been cut by 15-20% in every department, but athletics has gone up. Everyone else is running around trying to figure out how best to serve students in this atmosphere, but even the mention of athletics puts you in cloak and dagger territory. People are met with incredulous smiles and headshakes: "Don't go there." Why? Not because of the money. It's about alumni, boards of trustees, politicians.

 

[cohenzone]

Even at U Texas the money isn't what it's cracked up to be, not when the school owes $250 million for the buildout. Oklahoma St., the same thing. When President Else Benitez at Texas A&M was told at the last minute (end of year) that athletics would have a $18 million shortfall which the school hadn't accounted for in the general budget, she told the AD that they would simply fill that black hole with funds from the coming year. She was out on her ear quickly after that. I see it my school where budget have been cut by 15-20% in every department, but athletics has gone up. Everyone else is running around trying to figure out how best to serve students in this atmosphere, but even the mention of athletics puts you in cloak and dagger territory. People are met with incredulous smiles and headshakes: "Don't go there." Why? Not because of the money. It's about alumni, boards of trustees, politicians.

Interesting however, isn't it, that when other funding alternatives are proposed, like raising ticket prices - a drop in the bucket, upping other revenue sources whatever, there aren't too many voices shouting "right on". At public universities where money raising directly involves political issues, there isn't a lot of active sentiment for using the general public as a funding source to keep sports going. I'm thinking long and hard about whether I want to pay the kind of money UConn wants for another 3 year cycle at the Rent just to keep my excellent seats. My couch is quite comfortable and I'm in the middle of every play.