Tennessee and Kentucky are two highly-seeded teams in the NCAA tournament, which started today. Kentucky graduates 31 percent of its basketball players; Tennessee graduates 30 percent. The U.S. Secretary of Education has suggested that any team graduating fewer than 40 percent of its players should be barred from post-season play. "If you can't graduate two out of five of your student-athletes, how serious are you about the academic part of your mission?" he asks, rhetorically.
A good question, I would have thought, but Tennessee's coach, Bruce Pearl, doesn't see it that way.
If he wants to fix it, fix it at the high school level, fix it at the middle school level, fix it at the elementary school level. I'm an educator, I'm a teacher. I share the pain in not having student-athletes graduate. But I don't want to deny the opportunity to student-athletes who are not prepared. I'm going to stand up here and I'm going to fight for student-athletes who come in who aren't as prepared.
Does anyone besides me find anything odd about this argument?
Pearl does not want to deny students the opportunity to play college basketball merely because they do not have the academic preparation to attend college. And this means, necessarily, that young men should not be denied the opportunity to play college ball merely because there's no way in hell they'll ever graduate from college.
His argument makes sense only if we view college basketball as a collection of semi-professional conferences, each member team being associated for sentimental reasons with a college or university. In that case, it would be unreasonable to deny a high school graduate the opportunity to play for a member team simply because he was not interested, prepared, and/or capable of handling college-level work and, ultimately, graduating. Such teams would be licensed to use an affiliated school's name and logo and provided a place to play on the school's campus. No one would care -- it would be totally immaterial -- whether any athletes actually chose to avail themselves of the opportunity to enroll at the school while they happened to be living in the area.
Such an arrangement may be closer to the reality of today's world than anyone in academia wishes to admit. Outside the Ivy League Conference, few if any college basketball teams are made up of a bunch of college kids who simply enjoy shooting hoops and who take time out from their studies to engage in good natured competition with rival universities.
I know. You've heard it all from me before, back when I was rhapsodizing over the basketball-shooting engineers from Cal Tech. Whenever I explain my views to even my most rational and sympathetic friends, I find them nodding quietly in agreement, in the same way they'd agree with some abstruse mathematical argument I proposed, one that had no discernable relationship to the real world.
Then they begin discussing the Huskies' recruiting prospects for the coming season.
Oh well. WTF. Washington (29 percent graduation rate) plays Marquette in the first round of the NCAA East regionals, coming up shortly at 4 o'clock .
GO DAWGS!!
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