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Tuesday, 27 March 2007 14:10 |
 | | Roland Martin |
CHICAGO ó Administrators, coaches and fans at Florida A&M University were highly offended that the historically black college was forced to compete against Niagara in what the NCAA billed as a first-round game of the annual basketball tournament, but was really a ìplay-inî game to earn your way to the tourney.
But when Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Floridaís Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, released his annual report on the graduation rates of Division IA basketball, FAMU supporters were quite muted in their reactions.
According
to Lapchick, FAMU did not graduate a single basketball player who
entered as a freshman between 1996 and 1999. If you toss in players who
earned their degrees after transferring, arrived from a junior college
or earned a degree more than six years after enrollment, the university
only graduated 9 percent of its players.
That graduation rate is absolutely pathetic.
But donít think
FAMU was the greatest offender. Ohio State, which is the top-ranked
school in the nation according to the polls, was at the bottom of the
list when it came to graduation, with only 10 percent of its players
who entered as freshmen graduating.
There are a
litany of schools playing in the tournament that have graduation rates
so low that if their field-goal percentage each game equaled it, the
schools would likely just get rid of their basketball programs.
And donít think
Iím picking on FAMU and Ohio State. Whatever joy I may have had over my
alma mater, Texas A&M University, entering the tournament as a No.
3 seed, its highest ever, dissipated when I read Lapchickís report
showing that 15 percent of the schoolís players graduated.
The NCAA has
tried to do something about these terrible stats by revoking
scholarships. Among those likely to lose a few because of low scores
last year are FAMU, Texas A&M and New Mexico State.
If a basketball
coach lost as many games as he did graduating players, the alumni would
be calling for his head, and the university president would oblige.
The only real
solution to ensure schools do more to graduate players is for the NCAA
to ban them from the tournament. Such a move might be considered over
the top and too harsh, but what else is there left to do? Clearly,
losing scholarships isnít doing the trick.
Like it or not,
big-time college athletics is now all about making the big money. When
you can collect a $10 million check for playing in a Bowl Championship
Series football game, and earn millions when your team advances to the
Final Four, the last thing you really care about is whether a player is
performing in the classroom. The only thing that concerns you is how
your team can improve its rebounding, free-throw shooting and defense.
This is not what college is supposed to be about.
The bottom line
is simple: Nearly all of the players on the 65 NCAA tourney teams will
never see an NBA court. They will need to get regular jobs like the
rest of us, and that college degree will be vital to their future.
NCAA officials
must do the right thing and tie what happens in the classroom to taking
advantage of the riches their Division IA sports have to offer.
If fans of FAMU,
Ohio State and Texas A&M, and any of the other schools that are
graduation cellar-dwellers truly care about their players, how they
perform in the classroom should matter more than our NCAA tourney pools.
ï
Roland S. Martin, editor of The Chicago Defender newspaper, is author of ìSpeak, Brother! A Black Manís View of America.î
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