Hoop Dreams?
Low graduation rates should be a penalty call against the NCAA
2009-03-19
By DeAngelo Starnes

The annual NCAA Basketball Tournament kicks off today.  No doubt you will cheer for your favorite team, alma mater, and/or teams that give your bracket a high winning percentage.  While you may no doubt enjoy their basketball exploits on the floor, you may or may not be surprised by a few statistics.

As the majority of the basketball players hooping this weekend will be African American, only 29 of the 65 schools graduated 60% or more of these athletes.  And that’s with two schools not providing any graduation data and one other (Utah) having no Black ballplayers.  That number “improves” to 33 schools if you use 50% as the floor for graduation rates for Black ballplayers.  By contrast, only 3 programs failed to graduate at least 50 percent of its white ballplayers (in all fairness, six teams in the tournament have all-Black rosters).

These figures become more alarming when you consider that seven of these schools report African American graduation rates of 25% or less with Arizona, Cal State Northridge, Gonzaga, and Maryland failing to graduate a single Black ballplayer.  And Gonzaga is a tourney darling carrying a fourth seed.

Lest you think the presence of Black coaches and/or Black athletic directors will improve African American graduation rates, there’s no proof of that so far.  There are fourteen African American coaches in this year’s tournament.  Of those fourteen, eight have graduation rates of less than fifty percent (Cal State Northridge, Clemson, Louisiana State University, Minnesota, Missouri, Morgan State, Oklahoma, and Washington).  There are three schools in the tournament that have Black athletic directors (Ohio State, USC, and Syracuse).  Only Syracuse has a graduation rate of at least 50 percent.

In 1989 the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics was formed “to recommend a reform agenda that emphasized academic values in an arena where commercialization of college sports often overshadowed the underlying goals of higher education.”   To this end, the Knight Commission recommended that a school carry at least a fifty percent graduation rate to be eligible for post-season play.  If that recommendation were followed players from high profile programs such as Connecticut, Louisville, Michigan State, USC, Clemson, and Maryland, among others, would be at home hitting the books rather than lacing up their sneakers to hit the courts.

Of course, the reason the recommendation is not enforced leads to the inevitable issue of money.  College hoops, particularly the tournament, provide athletic departments big bucks.  Bucks that help fund other athletic programs that are not so high profile.  The problem is that there is life beyond the tournament.  And in these economic times with shifting industries and skills, education is paramount. 

These kids are capable of achieving higher graduation rates.  Consider they utilize knowledge of angles, curves, rates of speed, and spacing while hooping.  More impressive, they must consume rapid-fire instructions under the heat of competition with deafening noise in the background.  Those skills are transferable to the classroom and testing.

What’s disturbing is you haven’t heard about African American graduation rates on those countless panel discussions about the brackets on the endless parade of sports programs on television.  How many times have you heard about it on sports radio?  Read about it in the newspapers or news sites?  Shouldn’t the issue of African American graduation rates warrant at least a mention when talking brackets?

This is not to say the Knight Commission hasn’t nudged the rates up.  Since its inception, graduation rates have improved at many programs.  According to a Boston Globe report, 41 of 64 teams had a graduation rate of 50% or less in 1999.  In 2009, those numbers improved to where 41 of 65 have graduation rates of at least 50% with the African American graduation rate improving from 43% to 53%.

In my mind, even a 50% graduation rate is too low.  100% should be the standard.  Two African American coaches, Kevin Broadus of Binghamton and Leonard Hamilton of Florida State, achieved this goal.  Hopefully, their coaching brethren, Black and white, will follow this example.

DeAngelo Starnes is a writer and attorney living with his wife and son in Denver.