NCAA Graduation Rates Should Make Us Mad Each March

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 "play-in" game to earn your way to the tourney.

But when Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida's 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 don't 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 don't think I'm 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 Lapchick's report showing that 15 percent of the school's 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 isn't 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.

Roland S. Martin is a CNN contributor and a talk-show host for WVON-AM in Chicago. Please visit his Web site at www.rolandsmartin.com. To find out more about Roland Martin and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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