No Se Nada

I did undergrad at UC Davis, which at the time was D-II and a many-time winner of the Sears Director's Cup for the best all-around D-II sports program in the U.S. (Stanford usually wins the D-I Sears. And so oh, wasn't it crazy to see UCD beat S in football and bball this year?)

I was (and still am, I guess) both a pointyheaded academic type and a serious club athlete, and I appreciated the internal UC Davis ethos that all athletes were expected to be student athletes.

I also held (and hold) the strong opinion that unless you want to make a mockery out of what college is and is supposed to be in our society, any college athlete should be required to prioritize academics first and athletics second.

Problem is, there is no NFL and NBA equivalent of the extensive minor league system for baseball. If you look at the draft lines for all three sports you see lots of highschoolers taken in the MLB draft, the occasional highschooler taken in the NBA (although that's ending soon) and no highschoolers taken by the NFL. So some of the best ballers and football jocks use college as the minors, while seeing the classes as an annoying distraction.

The NCAA, seeing the hypocrisy of letting college sports programs be a farm system to the pros, finally decided to do something about it. They instituted the Academic Progress Rates system, designed to punish programs that don't graduate their athletes. The first report was released yesterday and ESPN.com reports on it here, with a distillation of the punished programs.

You can see the numbers for yourself [and UCD grads will snicker loudly that Sac State made the list: "Sacramento State in California had the most teams affected (six) and could face the loss of as many five athletes. The school could lose as many as 2.3 scholarships." Talk about poor returns for poor performance. Has Sac State ever done anything well in sports??]

Three things I want to pull out:

1. This lamentation by a coach:

   First-year New Mexico State coach Reggie Theus told ESPN.com that it wasn't fair that a new coach gets penalized for past transgressions.

   ...

   "There's got to be some sort of grace period to see if there is improvement [for new coaches] before you get hit with a penalty," Theus said Wednesday. "We've got a new AD, a new president, new programs that we've implemented and you would think we could get at least one of those penalties rescinded. But we didn't.

   "We'll survive it," Theus said. "But for new coaches it puts you behind the eight ball."
   

   Uh, no, and too fucking bad. It's not about the coach, it's about the school, it's about a permissive system campus-wide and you're damn right your program should be dinged for bad performance. (GE dumps a bunch of dioxin into the Hudson River. Then they get a new CEO and board. They're still going to pay for the cleanup.)
   

2. The major conference vs. minor conference break down. Minor conferences far outweigh the majors in performance transgressions. Are the minor conference schools trying too hard to keep up, willing to recruit good athletes that they know are academic duds? If so, why are the Sac States of the world trying so hard to be the UNC's of the world? Accept your place in life and move on....
   
3. The HBCUs are apparently seeking exemptions from these performance criteria.

   There is some concern that historically black colleges and universities were affected disproportionately.

   "It is an issue," Brand said. "A number of those institutions received mission exemptions, but there are a number of institutions that are still not performing as well for student-athletes as they are for the rest of the student body."
   

   That brings affirmative action into this realm in a very interesting way. It's one thing to say, in terms of college admissions, "race quotas are necessary to equalize pre-college learning disparities and/or to balance diversity." It's completely another thing to say, "once in college, students' academic success should be judged through the race lens."