By CHRIS POWELL
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Having led the University of Connecticut men's basketball team to an improbable
national championship this week, point guard Shabazz Napier was defiant. "This
is what happens when you ban us," Napier growled, referring to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association's refusal to let the team participate in last
year's tournament because of academic deficiencies.
It's great for UConn fans that Napier and the other players who stayed with the
team may have taken it personally, but they had not been the target of the ban;
the university itself had been, for taking advantage of NCAA standards that were
weak to begin with.
Indeed, the academics of the two major college sports -- basketball and football
-- are increasingly "academic" themselves. The whole starting lineup of the team
the UConn men defeated for the championship, the University of Kentucky
Wildcats, is expected to quit school shortly to enter the National Basketball
Association draft, and all five are mere freshmen.
Many of the best college basketball and football players give interviews
signifying that they are challenged to assemble a simple grammatical sentence.
They're not in college for the book learning but to earn a chance to get
recruited for the professional leagues. Even the most NCAA-compliant colleges
structure the curriculums of their top athletes to go easy on their minds and
still surround them with tutors. For many of those who actually complete four
years, the most that can be expected is a degree in sociology.
This doesn't mean that the college players don't work. Most may work far harder
than most other students. It's just not academic work but rather physical and
character work resulting from enormous discipline -- and
for many it may prove more valuable than anything they could have learned in
class.
That may be the lesson of the UConn men's basketball program under Coach Jim
Calhoun and now Kevin Ollie. Few coaches graduated more players to professional
and personal success than Calhoun did, whether or not they left UConn with a
degree.
Are college athletes being cheated -- cheated out of education or the money they
help their colleges earn? If they are cheated out of education, it is a choice
they made before they got to college, for which they bear responsibility. If
sports beckon them too much, it is a mistake originating at home and in high
school.
As for being cheated out of money, there now is talk of unionizing college
athletes as if they were college employees. This will bump up against the NCAA's
tight restrictions on how players can be compensated -- restrictions that
increasingly seem meant not to protect players against the taint and temptations
of professionalization but rather to reserve all sports revenue for NCAA-member
colleges themselves.
For the colleges that are most successful in the most lucrative sports, the
concept of the student-athlete is increasingly a myth. Maybe it gives the public
some assurance about ideals in higher education, but no more so than it serves
higher education's economic objectives. So why bother trying to sustain the
myth?
Why not acknowledge that college basketball and football are the minor leagues
for the pros and let young men and women play in them without regard to their
academic standing -- even without being students? An age restriction on players
might accomplish as much as the pretense of academic restrictions.
That pretense is getting old. It was old in 1932 when
Groucho Marx portrayed a college president in "Horse Feathers" and scolded the
resentful faculty: "This college is a failure. The trouble is we're neglecting
football for education."
If the alternative to football and basketball is going to remain mere sociology,
Groucho was right.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.