From my May 2010 Basketball Times column...
March Madness is mostly just great basketball. This season was no exception, capped off with a championship game for the ages. March Madness also stirs the never-ending debate about the often-strange mixture of athletics, amateurism, academics and capitalism.
Many, including me, lament the inevitable expansion of the NCAA Tournament from 65 teams to 96. It’s going to kill interest in bracketology. It rewards mediocrity. It diminishes the regular season and conference tournaments. Too much missed class time. College basketball’s end of season is as close to perfection (as opposed to college football). As I’ve written in this column before, the NCAA runs the risk of oversaturating the market with product and ultimately damaging the golden March Madness brand. Scarcity works. And, if I am wrong, I wasted a lot of time and money getting my MBA. At this year’s Final Four, the debate escalated at an NCAA news conference when John Feinstein, despite repeated attempts, could not get Greg Shaheen to admit that most “student-athletes” participating in the second week of the tournament would not step foot in the classroom. It was a near-perfect setup, after the NCAA began the conference with a presentation on the great strides athletes are making in the classroom. Graduation rates are increasing. Therefore, the critics are wrong. Of course, Feinstein just wanted the NCAA to admit the painfully obvious fact that players on teams who play in the second week of the tournament will not be spending much time in the classroom. In Shaheen’s defense, he was there to discuss the business of college basketball – and he, no doubt, did not want to get into the strained argument that March Madness has anything to do with school. Shaheen remembered his talking points when he later told SI.com: “The point is, it isn’t about the money raised. It’s about what’s done with the money. That’s why our goal has been to grow and diversify the revenue stream. If you call us greedy, you clearly don’t understand what we do with the money. That’s why we have that new wave of PSAs: ‘Look: Here’s where the money goes.’” Of course, the NCAA doesn’t mention that a good portion of the money also funds excesses in college sports. I am all for college basketball generating more revenue, but let’s not forget that this is being done on the backs of a small percentage of student-athletes. Last month, I wrote an op-ed piece in U.S. News & World Report on whether teams who do not graduate at least 40 percent of its athletes should be banned from the NCAA Tournament, as proposed by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
My view: Duncan’s proposal might sound like a good idea, especially on paper. But first, it would punish the wrong people: the current players, rather than the coaches and administrators who brought in these long-gone titular student-athletes. As I have argued many times before, schools should do their level best to increase graduation rates, but they must do so without gaming the system (e.g. steering athletes to easier majors, “over” tutoring, etc.). As we learned from the NCAA’s APR, the most well-heeled athletic programs did the best job of making the “cut rate” in order to avoid losing scholarships. On the subject of kids not spending enough time in the classroom: The Wall Street Journal article “The Case for Saturday School,” showed that “Kids in China already attend school 41 days a year more than students in the U.S. Now, schools across the country are cutting back to four-day weeks.” It also pointed to a recent study by University of Maryland researcher Dave Marcotte that “shows that even the loss of a few instructional days can erode academic performance.” The article pointed to a disturbing trend in our educational system: “In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance.” There’s a parallel here with college sports, especially men’s basketball. Teams are playing more games during the school week with later starting times and more travel. Graduation rates are going up, but some athletes are missing more class than ever. Something has to give, right? The NCAA constantly talks about striking a proper balance between academics and athletics, which, I agree, there needs to be. I also applaud the NCAA and its efforts to stress academics. But, at a certain point, it does need to walk the talk.
--Marc Isenberg