Making over March Madness

The NCAA's Student-Athlete Myth

BY NEALE MAHONEY

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Illustration by John Gruen
Hungry Basketball

FOR THE FIRST TIME in years, I didn't have money riding on the NCAA tournament. Without a financial investment I figured my interest would be lower. I was wrong. This March, I watched more college basketball than I have since high school, and I wasn't the only one. According to the pollsters at Nielsen, the Illinois-UNC final scored a 16, the highest rating a final has received in six years. The tournament as a whole scored an average rating of 7.3, the best in 11 years. With more talented players leaving college early to join the NBA every year, and the most talented skipping straight from high school, the high ratings came as a surprise. The quality of college basketball seems not to be at its peak, so why an increased interest?

Watching the upset in the first round game between Syracuse and the University of Vermont moved me-and many of my fellow students-from anxiety, to cheers and finally to roars as fourteen seed UVM beat out number three Syracuse in overtime. We envisioned the guys on TV as student-athletes-students like us, and athletes in addition. We could relate to the basketball players because they were college students, too. Unlike the NBA-ers, neither they nor we make six figure salaries. College basketball players live in dorms, eat in dinning halls, and go to frat parties like we do. College basketball players are students like us. But are they? Is the connection between us students and the elite student-athletes of Division I Men's Basketball nominal or is it real? The NCAA has made it their mission to make those student-athletes accessible, so that college students-myself included-tune in and watch people who, supposedly, are just like them.

Kickball Players Don't Cut It

If you asked a college basketball superstar like Luther Head of Illinois or J. J. Redick of Duke if an intramural kickball-er is a student-athlete, you'd likely get a resounding "no." Student-athletes practice five days a week-running suicides until they vomit, lifting weights until their eyeballs bulge, watching hours of video of their opponents. They put in the hard work, they commit to their team and are rewarded with TV cameras and screaming fans. IM kickball players don't cut it.

But we students consider college basketball players to be student-athletes. We let them assume the title "student" despite their frequent lack of commitment to scholarship. Some student-athletes have assigned note-takers, never show up to class, and take classes no less ridiculous than Underwater Basket Weaving or Synchronized Marble Stacking. If the once-a-week kickballer doesn't constitute an athlete, why should the once-a-month class-attendee constitute a student? Whatever the answer, the NCAA wants to ensure that we view them as both students and athletes, regardless of their class attendance.

Fooling The Fans

To preempt any criticism, the NCAA runs an advertisement campaign to propagate the myth of the ideal student-athlete. "I swim laps, I study for tests," explains a perky swimmer in pool attire. "I work hard in the gym, I work hard in the lab," testifies a sandy-haired baseball player. The advertisements end with the tagline, "There are over three hundred and sixty thousand NCAA athletes and most of us are going pro in something other than sports." It's an appealing ad campaign, convincing viewers that the players who entertain us on TV are enriching their minds in the process. The mental toughness acquired from endless sprints will yield payoffs during all-nighters.

Unfortunately, the facts speak otherwise. The NCAA has recently proposed an academic referendum that would require teams to graduate at least 50 percent of their athletes or lose scholarships. While there are many student-athletes who perform exceedingly well in their classes, the aggregate statistics for student-athletes are shameful. Currently about 30 percent of football teams, 24 percent of baseball teams, and 20 percent of men's basketball teams graduate less than 50 percent of their athletes. The figures are worse when only the top programs are considered. Of the 46 men's basketball teams receiving top 25 votes at the close of this season, 31 had graduation rates under 50 percent and 16 had graduation rates under 30 percent, according to athleticscholarships.net. In addition, the non-graduates are much more likely to be African-American. According to a study by Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, while 57 percent of male college basketball players are black, 58 out of 330 Division I programs have failed to graduate a single black player in the past 6 years. Among the teams receiving top 25 votes, Kentucky, Utah, Pacific, Oklahoma, Cincinnati, Nevada, Louisiana State, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Minnesota have a black graduation rate of zero.

A proposed referendum to require 50 percent graduation rates shows that the NCAA is trying to make their ad campaign a reality. But such a referendum doesn't safeguard scholastics. Even at Brown, where winning-at-all-costs is not the mantra, coaches outwit the graduation, SAT, and GPA requirements by recruiting students in twos. Academically weak, star athletes are recruited in tandem with academically strong, lesser athletes. Coaches here and around the country know that if they recruit a smart kid with a 1500 and a 4.0 to ride the bench, they can go after a star athlete with rock bottom scores. If coaches continue to recruit in this manner, the follow scenario becomes more likely: Teams could become divided-the starters largely underprivileged minorities with little chance of graduating and the benchwarmers mostly white, suburbia-raised, business majors headed for middle management.

Removing The Resource Bias

In its "Star Students Are Star Athletes" campaign, the NCAA doesn't account for the additional support athletes receive. It doesn't factor in the vast disparity in resources spent on student-athletes compared to regular college students. Unlike student-athletes, regular students don't have special computer labs, school-supplied travel laptops, and personal tutors. Regular students don't have individual advisors who pick out the easiest classes with the most forgiving professors. Regular students fail, drop out or take leave from college for a variety of reasons-lack of support and unequal resource allocation is certainly being one of them. Give Joe Schmo the same support as Mr. Basketball and then crunch the math; the NCAA should compare student-athletes with students who receive similar attention. Why should students who excel at tossing orange balls through a metal ring receive radically different treatment from their universities?

College sports are exciting not because of the quality of play but because the fans connect with the players. The fans are in large part college students, recent college graduates and college students to be. Strengthening the connection between student-athletes and students by making the student-athlete's experience similar to that of regular students will increase college basketball's popularity. The NCAA knows this, but a truth-bending PR campaign and an easily outwitted graduation requirement can't continue this increasingly contrived connection forever. The NCAA needs to take strong steps to maintain and reinforce the similarities between student-athletes and students. Then millions of others will continue to tune in to college basketball every March.

Neale Mahoney B'05 knows a thing or two about style and grace

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