HE'S 6' 5", HAS A 17.3 PPG AND A 8.2 RPG AND DON'T YOU DARE ASK ABOUT HIS GPA

As the NCAA basketball tournaments begin, you'll hear endless stats about players' heights, weights, shooting, assists and rebounding. What you won't hear is whether they are graduating.
Graduation rates for NCAA scholarship athletes have been up somewhat recently--rising to 62 percent, better than the 60 percent when the organization began keeping statistics in 1984. Graduation rates for African American male basketball athletes are also rising--38 percent of the class that entered school in 1996 eventually walked to "Pomp and Circumstance," versus 28 percent of the entering class of 1995. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the NCAA has decided that in most cases, it will no longer reveal the male African American basketball graduation rates for specific universities.
Officially this is to "protect privacy," since basketball scholarship holders are sufficiently few that you can sometimes figure out, from raw data, who it was that never graduated. Apparently NCAA scholarship athletes have a right to not get an education, and that right must be protected! But the real reason for the policy is to protect the NCAA and those many universities that exploit African American players for ticket sales, making no attempt to provide meaningful educations. Many of the schools are public universities that use public funds and have extremely elaborate disclosure rules on other aspects of race and education, but now keep secret the key information about race, education and athletics.
In 2002 the NCAA men's basketball champion, University of Maryland, was deeply embarrassed by reports it had graduated just 19 percent of all basketball players in the previous decade. In 2003 the NCAA men's basketball champion, Syracuse University, was deeply embarrassed by reports that it went five straight years without graduating an African American male player. (In the last two years, Syracuse basketball graduation rates for black players have been good.) After the revelations about Maryland and Syracuse, there were calls for action and reform. What’s the big reform? Henceforth, graduation rates for African American players will be covered up.
Go to the NCAA's site, check the graduation rates at Ohio State University, and this is what you see. Recently the school has graduated only 25 percent of basketball scholarship holders who enrolled as freshmen, a meager achievement compared to 56 percent graduation for Ohio State enrolling freshmen overall in the same category. But there's no breakdown for African American players--everything in those columns has been blanked out, with little notes saying, "Regulations require that these data be suppressed." I chose Ohio State at random. Here, view the graduation rates of scholarship athletes at any big NCAA school: click on "site index" then "graduation rates." You'll find lots of details about women's cross-country, but also find almost everything about men's basketball graduation rates is now "suppressed."
Check the graduation rates for men's basketball at the University of Kentucky, number-one seed in the NCAA tournament announced yesterday. The entire field is blank--"regulations require that these data be suppressed." Forget the African American graduation question; did anyone at all graduate from the Kentucky men's basketball program since 1996, the baseline year? Good luck trying to find out. Everything about academics and the Kentucky basketball program is "suppressed."
How about plucky Saint Joseph's, this year's sentimental favorite and much-hyped in the media as a school that's winning games and yet still cares about education? Here are St. Joseph's page graduation rates. One column for men's basketball gives an African American graduation rate of 43 percent, well below the school's overall graduation rate of 73 percent. Most other figures about St. Joe's basketball are blank, just those asterisks that lead to the word "suppressed."
This seems still more proof that the NCAA's claim to care about education for sports-factory-school athletes is transparent pretense. University presidents and alumni booster clubs were upset by all the negative publicity about low graduation rates for African American scholarship basketball players; so instead of reform, the NCAA now keeps the embarrassing information secret. Last winter my alter ego Tuesday Morning Quarterback wrote of the situation, "A second straight NCAA men's basketball champion has been one that shrugs at education. What message will other NCAA men's coaches take away? Shrug at education." The NCAA itself has joined the shrug.
The rigors of big-college basketball academics are indicated by this final exam in a University of Georgia course taken by basketball players. The course was taught in 2001 by Jim Harrick Jr., a basketball assistant and the son of former Georgia men's basketball coach Jim Harrick; both have since left the school under clouds. The very brief test includes such mind-challenging puzzlers as "how many halves are in a college basketball game?" and the sure-to-stump "How many points does a 3-point field goal account for?" The NCAA recently sanctioned Harrick Jr. for "fraudulently" awarding grades of A to scholarship basketball players in the course, even though the players never actually took the pathetic purported exam. That is to say, academics at the University of Georgia were such a complete joke that a coach had cover up for the fact that players skipped out on exams that asked how many points you get for a three-point shot.
Whom to root for in the men's tournament? Stanford, I guess, which graduated all its African American scholarship players in the most recent survey. That the NCAA will disclose.

Taken