It must be getting close to college football season, because my mind keeps wondering to all things college football, the NCAA, and the Fiesta Bowl.
Yet, when I think of the NCAA today there are more important things that come to mind besides if West Virginia University have a shot a national championship. With recent actions to declare some high schools as ineligible to receive accreditation from the NCAA because of weak academics, making it harder for their students to participate in college sports, we are left scratching our heads. Where do concerns about academic quality fit into the realm of the NCAA?
Now, having an athletic organization dip its hands into the academic equation is nothing new in athletics. High school athletic organizations have long maintained minimum GPA standards for athletes to maintain eligibility in a sport. Seldom, though, do we see high school groups take the action of declaring a school ineligible because of weak academics.
Essentially that is what the NCAA did recently. After a study commission declared that essentially students were unprepared for the rigors of college – we could’ve told them that – they placed the blame on what some have called on academic prep schools that essentially are training grounds for some of the top college athletes of all time. For those unfamiliar with this concept, think Oak Hill Academy in Virginia – one of the nation’s top prep schools that have produced talented athletes such as Jerry Stackhouse. Oak Hill Academy, last week, was removed from the list of schools that were in jeopardy of being declared ineligible by the NCAA.
Some were not as lucky. Earlier this month, the NCAA increases its list of schools that it would not recognize to 24 and in the process included two schools from North Carolina – New Horizon Christian Academy in Conover and Word of God Christian Academy in Raleigh. In essence, the NCAA has determined that the academic nature of these schools are not on par with other schools or that they are diploma mills that give diplomas to athletes so they can advance to the college game without any real education. Athletes from these schools can still be declared eligible to participate in NCAA athletics, but their road was made a little harder with the action.
Where the NCAA finds it’s reasoning to examine athletic components among the institution’s core values, where it states that members seek to strive for excellence on the playing field as well as in the classroom. But does the NCAA need to crackdown on private high schools to achieve academic excellence?
At least one person tends to believe that the NCAA does not. Murray Sperber, a vocal critic of the NCAA and author of the book Beer and Circus, compared the NCAA’s efforts to regular private high schools and its academic quality to the levees in New Orleans.
“They look good but the NCAA system is totally corrupt and leaks like crazy,” Sperber wrote in an e-mail. “Going after a few private schools hardly solves the problem of questionable grades for jocks in thousands of regular American high schools. The system worked much better when they had Prop 48 and minimal SAT/ACT scores. But, on the phony grounds of political incorrectness, the NCAA threw out freshmen athlete eligibility based on the SAT/ACT and went to the new ridiculous minimal college eligibility rules based on high school grades.”
The eligibility scale Sperber refers to changes the SAT and ACT requirements for students as their grade point average in high school increases. For instance, a student with a 3.55 GPA or above would be declared athletically eligible with a SAT score of 400, while a student with a GPA of 2.000 would need a 1,010 on their SAT examination.
This places the NCAA’s own academic guidelines on academic standards for admission on top of whatever academic policies are in place for the member institution. It seems to be a case of a big bureaucracy trying to extend its reach across the spectrum. This is what we have with the NCAA.
When you peel the onion layers, the NCAA’s main purpose – or what should be its main purpose – is rule making and overseer of college athletics. The institution was formed primarily at the bequest of President Theodore Roosevelt to rein in some of the violence of football, especially with the creation of the flying wedge formation and gang tackling. But overtime the NCAA has grown into this large bureaucracy that has its hand in every pot in the academic equation.
The NCAA would be a more effective organization if it would keep its hands out of things it really outside of its reach. Academics though may have some part in the role of athletics, primarily when looking at eligibility schools themselves are ultimately the best judge of academic standards for their own institutions.
If that happens, you’ll probably see the same result as what the NCAA took, perhaps not. But ultimately the membership of the NCAA should take more responsibility in governing themselves in this matter – and other matters – than allowing the big government nature of the NCAA control the show.
Where the NCAA is at its best is working on the rules of the games and administering championship formats – we’ll leave the BCS discussion to the sports writers.