Education official suggests poor academic performance should ban SU men’s basketball from postseason
College basketball teams not on track to graduate at least half of their players should be punished and not have the opportunity to play postseason, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a press conference call Thursday. The Syracuse University men’s basketball team was cited as a team that needs to improve academic standing during the conference.
Of the 68 teams that began in the 2011 NCAA Tournament, 10 should be disqualified for the poor academic performance of players, Duncan said. Duncan did not name all of the 10 schools in the press conference, but SU was mentioned as one of them.
‘If you can’t manage to graduate half of your players, how serious is the institution and the coach and the program about their players’ academic success? Are you actually just preparing your student-athletes for success on the court, or in life?’ Duncan said in the press conference.
Institutions with an academic progress rate lower than 925, meaning 50 percent or fewer players are graduating, should be ineligible for postseason play, Duncan said. He also said he was now backing the Knight Commission’s recommendation to restructure the NCAA Tournament revenue distribution formula.
Of the teams playing the 2011 NCAA Tournament, there were 10 with multiyear APRs under the standard rate of 925 for the 2008-09 season. The current overall multiyear APR is 940.
At 825, the University of Alabama at Birmingham has the lowest of teams in the NCAA Tournament. The University of Southern California and Kansas State University completed the highest of the 10 with multiyear APRs of 924. With a multiyear APR of 912, SU is sixth on the list.
Kevin Quinn, vice president for public affairs at SU, said in a statement SU has always exceeded the APR standard throughout the basketball program’s history. The administration has not seen Duncan’s full proposal, Quinn said in the statement.
‘This past year was an anomaly, as we were affected by several student-athletes leaving early to pursue professional careers. We will exceed the APR standard when the next report is issued,’ Quinn said in the statement.
When Jonny Flynn, Paul Harris and Eric Devendorf left mid-semester during the 2008-09 season, the team’s APR was affected, Quinn said in an email. He said the program will exceed a 925 APR when the latest numbers are released in the spring, but he did not have specifics on what the program was doing to ensure the rise.
SU head coach Jim Boeheim said the loss of the student-athletes, which resulted in the team losing two scholarships for the 2009-10 year, would be ‘difficult to overcome’ in a June 10 article in The Daily Orange.
Boeheim said SU will have an APR of 926 when the next report comes out, according to an article published Friday in USA Today. He said Duncan’s proposal was ‘completely nuts.’ Pete Moore, spokesman for the team, said Boeheim declined to further comment on what was said in USA Today.
But discussion on changing the way APR affects teams is nothing new.
Last year, Duncan proposed teams should be barred from postseason play if they are not on track to graduate 40 percent of their players, he said in Thursday’s conference. The Knight Commission first proposed prohibiting teams with poor graduating rates from playing in the NCAA Tournament in 2001. Now Duncan is backing the idea that the NCAA should take into account academic and athletic standings.
Institutions are ‘making millions of dollars on their players’ backs,’ Duncan said in the press conference. Almost half of the money awarded to teams making appearances in the 2011 NCAA Tournament, $179 million, went to teams where less than half of the players were on track to graduate, Duncan said. For each game played in the 2011 NCAA Tournament, a team earns more than $1.4 million for its conference.
Duncan said he believes institutions would begin to reform if the NCAA took a stand on the issue of academics.
This year’s report on APRs also showed white student-athletes were graduating at a rate of 91 percent and black student-athletes at a rate of 59 percent.
There are institutions that do graduate all of their black players because coaches make sure their players are prepared, said Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the press conference. He said the NAACP will send a representative to each school that does not meet APR standards in the next few weeks to discuss fixing the problem.
SU’s only senior on the team this year, forward Rick Jackson, said college is ‘a work in progress.’ Earning a degree is important, and players on the team are trying, Jackson said.
‘But we came here to play basketball,’ Jackson said. ‘They shouldn’t take basketball away from you because you couldn’t graduate.’
Published on March 21, 2011 at 12:00 pm
