Masters of minutiae

NCAA sweats the small stuff, puts off big issues

LOS ANGELES -- Like so may that have delved into college athletics, Chicago attorney Peter Rush was overwhelmed when he got his hands around the NCAA manual.

Rush represents Colorado wide receiver Jeremy Bloom, who is challenging the NCAA over his right to tap endorsement income as a freestyle skier and still maintain his football eligibility.

What troubles Rush and others is the way NCAA leadership sweats the small stuff while crafting few rules that enforce educational standards. Most alarming, and it's a topic of the current NCAA academic reform movement, the rule-making body imposes no sanctions on schools that repeatedly fall to graduate its athletes.

In depositions taken in the Bloom cases last August, Rush pressed the graduation-rate issue in a testy exchange with longtime NCAA administrator David Berst, formerly head of the enforcement staff and now Division 1 chief of staff.

Rush: The question is, is graduation the ultimate goal of the education?

Berst: I would think I would agree that that is the ultimate goal of education.

Rush: The NCAA’s manual, which is all of the rules that the members have agreed to deem fit, is there any rule which punishes a member institution for a zero graduation rate?

Berst: Not yet

Rush: Why not?

Berst: We haven’t, to my knowledge, been able to design one that’s actually part of the discussion in the academic proposals.

Rush: The members haven’t decided they needed that rule, isn’t that right?

Berst: The members have not adopted a rule, that rule.

Rush: Can your student-athletes ... Can a team -- the national champion -- maintain a zero graduation rate for the past decade?

Berst: I don’t know the answer to that

Rush: The question is can it happen? Is there anything in the rulebook that prohibits that?

Berst: No. I think there is not.

Funny isn’t it that the NCAA has a telephone book-size manual, loaded down with guidelines and ominous threats of penalty. But when it comes to what should be paramount -- education, and the protection against college athletes being nothing more than unpaid professionals -- you can’t find a line in the book about punishing universities for systematic failure to graduate athletes.

Why not? Could it be schools don’t want their little secret out of the closet?

Colleges get slapped with a penalty if a booster hands $100 to a player or if a coach contacts a recruit during a "dead period." Meanwhile, you have major athletic programs with embarrassingly low graduation rates, like zero percent in the case of Oklahoma basketball, and the NCAA cops don’t lift a hand. No harm, no foul -- we suppose.

Now, finally, leadership appears willing to give more than lip service to academic reform. Under new initial and continuing eligibility standards that take effect in August, prospects will be required to take 14 [up from 13] high school core courses to be eligible as a freshman, with athletes also required to have 24 semester credit hours by the start of their sophomore year.

That’s great stuff, but new NCAA president Myles Brand isn’t in a rush to move on the second phase the reform movement -- in particularl, he's struggling with how to proceed on the issue of graduation rates. Some have championed a loss of scholarships or exclusion from NCAA championships for dismal rates. The Knight Commission has gone so far as suggest universities who do not graduate half their athletes be ineligible for postseason play.

On this, Brand champions cautions.

"Before we initiate a package or system of incentives and disincentives we also have to have a better way of counting graduation rates," Brand says. "Right now with the federally mandated six-year process, you find out when they enter school, and you find out six years later.

"But we don’t have a systematic accurate way of judging progress. And as a result there’s some unfairness in the system.

"So we need to do a better job, first of all, of counting graduations and progress towards a degree. Otherwise, I don’t think we can apply incentives and disincentives fairly."

OK, what he’s saying here is the college coaches have been right to scream all these years, that the methodology for determining graduation rates is flawed. It seems goofy that a player who initially enrolls at School A, transfers to School B and earns a degree would negatively impact School A’s graduation rate. That’s the way it is now, and it’s wrong.

Equally odd for the NCAA is Brand’s talk of incentives and positive reinforcement as strong motivating factors. What’s next, two additional football scholarships per-year for programs that keep their nose clean?

But look at the bright side, the NCAA is at least getting around to a long overdue issue.

Mike Fish is a senior writer for CNNSI.com.

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