Sports

Six Billion Reasons College Sports Won't Change

This year, the NCAA will be enforcing new academic standards aimed at raising graduation rates on all Division I sports teams to about 50 percent and threatening sanctions against programs that don’t comply.

But whether the NCAA is actually willing to impose severe penalties is unclear. Some of the teams that will have to struggle to meet academic requirements have been among the most successful and profitable in their respective sports.

While the new standards apply to a variety of men’s and women’s programs, no sport illustrates the NCAA’s dilemma better than men’s basketball. CBS is currently paying the NCAA a minimum of $6 billion over 11 years (2003-2014) for television and other rights to the Division I men’s basketball tournament, also known as March Madness.

From 1997-2003, the graduation rate for men’s basketball players at the University of Connecticut, winner of national championships in 1999 and 2004, was 27 percent. During the same six-year period, the University of Maryland at College Park, winner of the national championship in 2002, saw 25 percent of its players graduate. The University of Kentucky went to the Final Four three times and won national championships twice in the late 1990s, but only 8 percent of men’s basketball players who entered the school in 1997 had graduated by 2003.

Understanding the ways in which the NCAA’s current quandary may play out means understanding what the NCAA is and how it works.

Founded in 1906 to police dangerous, and occasionally deadly, college football games, the National Collegiate Athletic Association is the governing body for college athletics. It’s responsible for punishing schools that violate recruiting or academic guidelines, and it divvies up revenue from events like March Madness. NCAA athletics are separated into three divisions. Division I is the most elite and competitive division, with players routinely leaving to turn pro.

The NCAA is made up of about 1,270 member schools and governs about 360,000 athletes. The organization is democratic: Members get to vote on legislation every January, and membership is voluntary.

“Individual schools may not always be happy with decisions that the NCAA makes,” said Jeff Bernstein, assistant athletic director for sports information at New York University. “But they’re the ones who helped put those rules in place.”

The new rules hinge on a score called an Academic Progress Rate, or APR. All teams in Division 1 must keep their APR at or above .925, which equates to holding on to about half the players on a given team until they graduate. Schools that fall below the threshold will be subject to what the NCAA calls “contemporaneous,” or immediate, penalties, which restrict up to 10 percent of scholarship aid.

The NCAA is currently working on historical penalties, which are more serious sanctions based on academic underperformance over an extended period of time. While these penalties are still in the works, they could include fines and exclusion from tournament play. “Everything’s on the table at this point,” said Kent Barrett, an NCAA spokesman.

While stiff punishments could act as a catalyst for raising graduation rates, they could also foster resentment against the NCAA. If enough academically underachieving yet profitable teams get fed up with the rules, they could secede and form their own league. Schools who want reassurance that they can control their own destiny need only look to college football. The contracts for television rights to bowl games are arranged directly between the conferences and networks, not the NCAA.

But for successful athletic programs, the NCAA offers more than a yearly vote. During March Madness, for instance, athletic conferences (groups of schools) get a “unit” (about $152,000) for every game in which they are represented, money they, in turn, distribute to individual schools. Barrett said the NCAA doled out a total of $113.7 million to conferences like the Big East and Big Ten during the 2004-2005 season on behalf of teams participating in March Madness.

Benefits like these, combined with the reality that NCAA has yet to propose severe penalties, make for a stable status quo. Robert Mercer, director of the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a fan of the APR. “I like the fact that the results follow the coaches,” Mercer said. “That’s not a shot across the bow. That’s important.”

But Mercer also said he did not foresee significant sanctions being levied by the NCAA, and he didn’t anticipate the new regulations resulting in more parity among teams. He called the NCAA’s current initiative to raise graduation rates “watered down” and pointed out that teams will still receive warnings before penalties are actually imposed.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an assistant athletic director at a Division I school in the Northeast with consistently great basketball teams and low player graduation rates said she was not worried about the new rules and that she did not expect her school would be penalized despite their historically sub-par record of holding on to athletes until graduation.