College Football
NCAA academic reforms renew basic debate

By Bud Withers
Seattle Times staff reporter

ROD MAR / THE SEATTLE TIMES The convergence of college academics and athletics often has been undeniably rocky. But as the main economic draw in college athletics, big-name college-football programs are under pressure to come to terms with the new academic reforms.

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This is how you build a national-champion college football team:

In 2000, Alex Holmes came to the University of Southern California with plenty of credentials, both in football and academics. His SAT score was 1,300-plus.

He worked hard that first semester, pushing himself to the limit in school. But he felt he was falling behind on the football field. He was unhappy.

"I talked to some older guys," said USC's starting tight end, sitting outside the school's athletic shrine, Heritage Hall, on a bright August day. "They said, 'You have to make a decision. Do you really want to excel in football, or do you really want to be a really good student?'

"There's nothing wrong with being a really good student. But I sort of made a decision to focus my efforts toward my sport."

Understand, it wasn't as though Holmes became an academic-reinstatement case every quarter. He said he carries about a 2.8 grade-point average, or a B average.

"I just devoted myself more towards football," said Holmes. "Basically, instead of studying for six hours (daily), maybe I'd get an extra hour of sleep, and an extra hour of working out harder."

The academic/athletic debate that Holmes entertained will be increasingly carried out by thousands of students taking part in college sports, as a package of NCAA academic reforms reshapes that equation. Myles Brand, the NCAA president, has called the reform movement a "sea change" for college athletics.

Within months, schools will find out how they stack up in a "dry run" of new academic standards measuring how programs are doing with player eligibility and retention. By next fall, a program of penalties takes effect — "disincentives" is how the NCAA labels them — based on academic performance starting this fall.

Over a period of time, a new formula for graduation rates will be established. Two other key reforms: more core-course requirements for entering freshmen to become immediately eligible; and increased standards to measure progress toward a degree, with the goal of weeding out athletes who may consistently take low-level courses to remain eligible.

Todd Turner, the new athletic director at Washington, is a long way from putting his stamp on the UW program. But his fingerprints are all over the academic-reform movement: During and after his tenure at Vanderbilt, he chaired an NCAA committee that spent many months establishing the new system of rewards and penalties approved in the spring by the NCAA board of directors.

Now it's in the hands of another committee, chaired by University of Hartford president Walter Harrison, which is pinpointing some standards under which programs will be at risk of penalties.

"I wouldn't be spending all the time I am on this if I thought it was cosmetic," said Harrison. "I think it's real. They'll (doubters) begin to understand how real it is once they start seeing penalties handed out."

Impetus for change

Turner's committee was already well in place when some thunderbolts ripped at the NCAA's mission in the late winter of 2003:

The president of St. Bonaventure had approved admission of a basketball player who had a welding certificate, not a junior-college degree; an ex-team manager at Fresno State revealed he had done papers for basketball players; and Jim Harrick Jr., an assistant coach at Georgia, was teaching an accredited class in basketball, asking exam questions such as "How many points do you get for a three-point shot?"

While those were touchstones for reform, in reality the movement began picking up steam when school presidents began exerting more control in the late 1980s. As recently as 2001, however, the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics charged that "the problems of big-time college sports have grown rather than diminished." Prominent among the committee's sore points were "academic transgressions."

But it's not just the highly publicized violations like Georgia's that eat at academicians. The reform movement provides a sort of way station where it's reasonable to wonder whether the slot receiver who goes the distance on the bubble screen for dear old Tech is as much into his textbooks as he is his playbook.

In the early 1970s, federal legislation dropped on college athletic departments a sobering mandate: Make access and facilities equal for men and women. The feds didn't supply this addendum, but it followed anyway: "Oh, yeah, and balance the budget."

America's thirst for big-time sports — including those that swell the coffers of universities' general funds — coupled with athletic departments' needs to be financially viable, has led to a squirmy relationship between academic and athletic imperatives, and to all sorts of questions about the proper place of each.

To know that, you don't need to look any further than the makeup of that powerful, high-minded Knight Commission. One member is Elson Floyd, president of the University of Missouri, which admitted troubled guard Ricky Clemons to its basketball program two years ago. Floyd and his wife befriended Clemons, leading to a violation of Clemons' probation terms after his guilty plea for false imprisonment.

Another member: Georgia president Michael Adams. He was the one who approved hiring Jim Harrick Sr., despite Harrick's shadowy past as head basketball coach at UCLA and Rhode Island.

Against this sort of paradox, NCAA reformers are trying to cleanse college sports of its academic laggards.

"Certainly, college athletics is a business," said Harrison. "But it is not fundamentally a business. It's fundamentally education. This (reform package) is saying very strongly that we take very seriously the education of our student-athletes."

The biggest stakes

Men's basketball, with its early NBA entries and frequent transfers, has been the favorite whipping boy of NCAA reformers. A couple dozen programs, some of them regular qualifiers for the NCAA tournament, didn't graduate anybody for several years in the '90s.

Ultimately, however, it is football with more at stake. It is the cash cow for college athletics, so its ability to reconcile the academic reforms is paramount.

It is also football that recalls the oldest stereotypes about dumb jocks, and because of sheer numbers, riles its critics most. The sport is left to answer some of the most basic questions, including this one: Are these guys really students?

"Come spend a week with me and see if your opinion changes on that," challenged Washington State safety Hamza Abdullah, a co-captain who is three credits short of a social sciences degree. "Our balance between academics is amazing. There's a lot of pain, heartbreak and sacrifice."

Holmes was similarly defensive, saying, "People try to question athletes' intelligence and everything. I say, 'Listen, all you (classmates) are is a normal student. You might have to work or something, but that's not compared to killing yourself physically and going to class as well.'

"I don't expect athletes necessarily to do extremely well in school, not because they're not intelligent, but because the amount of pressure on us and the amount of stuff we have to do is so much."

Many football players, including large numbers at Washington and WSU, wouldn't be admitted without their athletic talents.

In a crackling memo written in March, outgoing UW faculty athletic representative Rob Aronson questioned whether the Huskies were admitting too many athletes unlikely to succeed academically. Still, in the last graduation-rates tabulation, Washington's football team was at 67 percent, No. 2 in the Pac-10 and close to the overall UW student average of 71 percent.

Tim Washburn, vice president of enrollment services at Washington, says the UW accepts up to 30 "special admit" athletes annually. That's a precise definition from a grid generated by the state Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Those below a 28 rating on a sliding scale of grade-point average and SAT score would be a special admit. A student with a 2.73 GPA and 1,000 SAT score would have a 28 rating, and statistically, would have an 80 percent chance of earning a 2.0 GPA his first year in college.

Using the same index, Janet Danley, WSU interim director of enrollment services, says the school had 59 applicants — including 22 athletes — for its "alternative admit" category for 2004-05. Thirty-four were admitted, 18 of them athletes.

But at both schools, there is a third range of athletes admitted — above the "special admit" category and below what it typically would take a normal student to be accepted.

In return for the break of admission, the football player tries to balance studies with an endeavor that at its best is character-building and campus-enhancing, and at its worst commercial and lacking any real educational component.

A different culture

Answering critics who question football, UW fullback James Sims, a 3.7 student last term in cinema studies, said, "You could also say, 'What good is television, what good is theater?' But we all know that it's an art form.

"Football is in our culture."

The culture, some would say, overvalues sports. But there are athletes who make the system work for them.

In 1995, the Cougars gave a scholarship to defensive lineman Eboni Wilson of Jefferson High in Los Angeles. He says he had an abysmally low SAT score of 470, poor enough to make him ineligible as a freshman.

That first semester at WSU, he got a 3.14 GPA. He graduated in four years with a psychology degree, earned a master's degree, then a doctorate in education. Now he's principal of a charter school in Chicago.

"If the athlete is going to take athletics and run with it and not embrace the educational aspect, it becomes pointless," Wilson said. "If you go out there and kill your body, you're wasting your time. You have to eventually work. Nobody can take your mind away from you."

Experiences like Wilson's give fuel to reform critics such as Temple basketball coach John Chaney, who has long argued that too often, minorities are left behind by such measures. Volleying from a different side are people like Jon Ericson of the Drake Group, a faculty-based organization critical of the structure of college sports.

Referring to success stories like Wilson's, Ericson said, "To me, it's just one of the lies we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel good that we're really trying to do something."

The Drake Group argues that there's a systemic problem of athletes in easy courses, easy majors, and professors who use the Buckley Amendment student-privacy law to avoid revealing courses athletes take and aggregate class GPAs.

"Until we disclose the courses athletes take, all reform is but tinkering," said Ericson, a former provost at Drake University. "We think disclosure by Enron is good and disclosure by the Catholic church is good. Faculty are great for demanding disclosure for everybody but themselves."

In the heart of Big Football country, Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive assesses the academic-reform package and concludes that for all the body blows college sports have absorbed, the concept is still standing.

"Obviously, the cynics believe we don't do it very well," he said. "But if you look at it, you can say not only have we provided ethnic diversity, we've taken a federal mandate of Title IX and turned it into a wonderful program for women."

And as for Alex Holmes, you could say his time at USC has given him a proper perspective of the college football experience. He focused on his sport, but in the Orange Bowl two years ago, he injured his back, forcing him to redshirt during the Trojans' 2003 national-title season.

"I didn't realize until last year, your career is over in one play," he said. "A university as prestigious as USC, to not take advantage of that is crazy.

"The most important thing is getting a degree."

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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