Undefeated attitude

The Knight Commission held meetings this past week in Washington D.C. to discuss the progress of the NCAA’s new rating system that penalizes teams for failing to meet specific academic standards.

The latest APR – or Academic Progress Report – led to 218 teams from 123 schools receiving some sort of penalty when it was released last month. Although a large number of teams received penalties in the first year in which they were levied, APR scores have been on the rise since the standard was introduced four years ago. This is encouraging news for the independent Knight Commission, which has been pushing for academic reform in athletics for nearly 20 years.

What caught my attention, were the comments made by Georgia Tech basketball coach Paul Hewitt, who chastised the NCAA for making “incomplete conclusions” and taking “a fly-over view of the supposed carnage that is college basketball.”

“While I like to see everyone who reaches college earn a degree,” Hewitt said, “we need to find more effective ways to achieve our goals.”

Hewitt, a member of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Academic Enhancement Working Group, went on to add that he’d like to see basketball implement a much shorter schedule and become a one-semester sport, but he admitted it’s “not going to happen” because of the lucrative television money that comes from playing more games, even in early November.

Coach Hewitt is representative of many college coaches – football and basketball alike – who dislike the idea of placing the blame on coaches for what they perceive as an arbitrary numbers game for making grades and receiving degrees.

The question I would pose to Coach Hewitt is, if not this, then what?

He already shot down his own suggestion of a shorter season by saying the money is too significant for that to ever happen.

Coaches need to be very clear in the message they send out to student-athletes about the importance of getting a degree and I don’t believe we send out that message by publicly questioning a new NCAA policy that actually has the teeth to accomplish what it set out to do.

Without the penalties for poor academic performance, most coaches, and schools for that matter, don’t have enough incentive to make graduation high on their list of requirements, or expectations, for their players.

Let’s look at this honestly – coaches do not get fired for not graduating their players. Phil Bennett would still be the head coach at SMU if he were judged on his graduation rate. Coaches get fired for not winning enough games – and if penalties for poor academic performance start affecting their win/loss records, graduation will become a higher priority. Period.

The first thing a coach does when he takes over a new program is to change the mindset of the players. The players must start believing they can win. They must believe they are talented enough to win. In order to be successful, the players must first start expecting to be successful. Losing can no longer be tolerated. It is no longer an option.

Well, if this is the case, what kind of message do we send out if we make statements that suggest that just attending college is a great benefit to the student-athlete even if they don’t get their degree? That is like a coach telling the players that it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose the game.

We need to instill the fact in each student-athlete that our ultimate goal for them is to earn their degree. Anything less than that is tantamount to losing.

Obviously, when the day is done there will always be a few kids who fall between the cracks. Just as every team can not go undefeated. However, losing must still make you sick and the goal must always remain to go undefeated – for everyone to get a degree.

Student-athletes must get their degrees not because they won’t be capable of ultimately succeeding in life without one; but because collegiate athletics can’t ever succeed without these student-athletes getting their degrees.

If we do not do everything we can to make sure that these young people get their degrees, then all we are doing is perpetuating a charade. The charade of having these players go to school and attend classes, when in actuality we are running nothing more than a professional football league disguised as collegiate athletics.

I used to tell my coaches that you get what you demand. We must start demanding that our players take full advantage of the opportunity they have before them, and leave our institutions with their degrees.