College Football
Field, classroom linked by scandal

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With college athletes hewing to a new call to be dedicated students, it reminds us that they haven't always fit that description. And some of those entrusted with acting as caretakers of that imperative have been offenders right along with the jocks.

Not that the Pac-10 is planning any galas, but the 2004 season marks the silver anniversary of one of the league's darkest periods of academic misconduct. It was in 1979 that the infamous bogus credits scandal swept the country, but primarily the Pac-10. As a result, five schools — USC, UCLA, Arizona State, Oregon and Oregon State — were ruled ineligible in 1980 for that season's Rose Bowl, and Washington won the watered-down race to Pasadena.

In a nutshell, football players received unearned credit — mostly at California junior colleges — for extension classes from nondescript universities, allowing them to remain eligible. The scandal began unraveling when eight ASU players were found not to have done work for credits given from extension courses from Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Mont.

Meanwhile, eight Oregon players were cited for the same type of violation, getting credit at Los Angeles Valley JC for extension courses from Ottawa University in Kansas. At least one player didn't even know he had been enrolled for the bogus course, and Oregon assistant coach John Becker — a future Seahawks assistant — resigned over the mess.

USC's indiscretions were different. Some 34 athletes, mostly football players, were found to have been given credit for no work in a speech communications class on the main campus.

The Trojans argued that their rule breaking shouldn't have been viewed as being as egregious as the other four schools'. Former NCAA czar Walter Byers, in his book "Unsportsmanlike Conduct," noted that USC faculty rep Jack Larsen pleaded for clemency, only to be rebutted by UCLA's Doug Hobbs, chairman of the Pac-10 committee ruling on the case.

"On the contrary, Jack," Byers quoted Hobbs, "the difference between obtaining bogus grades from a junior college and granting such grades from within your own university is akin to the difference between patronizing a house of ill repute and owning one."

An ironic note: Chief investigator for the Pac-10 in the case was Mike Slive, now commissioner of the oft-prosecuted Southeastern Conference.

Not that questions over the academic/athletic balance weren't entertained decades before. Wiles Hallock, former Pac-10 commissioner and a historian of the league, notes that the old Pacific Coast Conference hired Jonathan A. Butler for 15 months in the early 1930s to study various ills within the league.

Butler turned out a 48-page report, which said conference entrance requirements for athletes were below those of the universities themselves, and alleged that some athletes essentially were simulating John Belushi in "Animal House" — they had made only two years' worth of progress toward a degree after four years.
 
The conference summarily ignored Butler's nine-point plan for academic remedy. The San Francisco Chronicle labeled Butler's report "a dud."

But the conference would take note of a more exhaustive self-analysis within a decade. Ed Atherton, a former FBI agent, was hired as the PCC's first commissioner, and he penned a 1,000-page report on problems within the conference, mentioning the need for academic reform.

Nearly 30 years later, the raging academic issue in the Pac-8 Conference was the controversial "1.6 rule." In the mid-1960s, the NCAA implemented a rule preventing an entering athlete from receiving aid unless his grades and college-entrance test scores projected at least a 1.6 grade-point average (a low C).

Two conference schools ran afoul of the rule in the early '70s. Isaac Curtis, Cal's talented wide receiver, was among several athletes who didn't take a required college-board test but were certified eligible nonetheless, resulting in major sanctions against the Bears and Curtis' transfer to San Diego State. UCLA, meanwhile, also incurred probation for allowing a specially administered test — complete with a tampered answer sheet — for running back/sprinter James McAlister, father of current Baltimore Ravens cornerback Chris McAlister.

In 2001, USC lost two scholarships in football when tutors did most of the work on papers for two players. Trying to sort out the truth in the first case, the NCAA Committee on Infractions concluded, "The student-athlete's account was more credible than that of the tutor coordinator."

A more celebrated case put Cal on the sidelines when it otherwise would have earned a bowl bid during Jeff Tedford's first season in 2002. In 1999, two receivers, Michael Ainsworth and Ronnie Davenport, were given "C" grades despite doing little or no work and not buying the textbook in one spring class — for which they signed up retroactively in the summer.

It wasn't Cal's finest moment. The professor claimed he had thrown away their exams shortly after the end of the course, and the matter came to light only after the Pac-10 investigated following an internal probe by Cal in which it purported to find no wrongdoing.

Grading out
The NCAA will soon use a different way to compute graduation rates. These are the most recent ones available, based on whether scholarship freshmen entering in the 1996-97 school year graduated within six years. (Four-class averages represent the four freshman football classes entering from 1993-96.) Following are graduation rates for each of the Pac-10 schools, ranked in order of highest graduation rate for football players entering school in 1996-97:
School	Football	All students	Student- athletes	4-class average
Stanford	82	93	84	82
Washington	67	71	70	63
UCLA	61	85	64	63
Washington St.	60	62	67	57
Arizona State	54	52	65	44
Oregon	50	58	62	64
Oregon State	50	59	51	35
USC	45	76	56	61
California	44	84	73	50
Arizona	33	55	60	53