For those who follow sports, you may have heard about the new collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the players' union. One feature of the new CBA is that players have to be 19 to be eligible for the draft. The hope of course is that by raising the age of draft eligibility, there will be less recruitment of high school players. Whether that happens is an open question, but there are other issues involved.
On theory resulting from the NBA change is the the question of whether athletes will go to college for one year and then leave for the pros. In this regard, the NCAA has a vested interest in discouraging such behavior. One way they could discourage such activity, in all sports, is to change the way in which scholarships are handled. Admittedly, this idea is originally my father's but I have tried to develop on the idea.
The NCAA provides data on graduation statistics of student athletes compared to the student population as a whole. At first glance, just on general numbers it looks like students-athletes do better at graduating within SIX years. But if you review the data a little more, you see some disturbing numbers as well as some surprising numbers.
First, I just want to say that only 3 in 5 students as a whole graduate college within six years of first time enrollement. This bothers me for a number of reasons that are beyond this little article.
Next, fully 7 in 10 of female students athletes graduate--a full 10 percent higher than the average of the student body in general. This supports the general theory that more women are getting degrees than men even though there are fewer female student athletes in Division I colleges. Among female student athletes, the graduation rates for athletes is higher, in all sports in all categories than for the female student population as a whole. So at the very least, if you are a female athlete on an athletic scholarship, you are much more likely to use the scholarship for its intended purpose--getting an education.
Looking at some numbers for men though reveal the opposite story. More male students athletes fail to complete college in six years than the male population as a whole. The NCAA compiles statistics for male athletes in five catgories, baseball, basketball, cross-country/Track, football and everyone else. Only in other sports (61%) and track (60%) do the male athletes do better than the general population (57%). In football, the numbers a little worse, 55% graduate in six years compared to the general population of 57%. This may be the result of the physical demands of football and the NFL rule that a player must be a junior in college or at least three years out of high school to be eligible to play in the NFL rahter than any effort by the NCAA.
In baseball and basketball, the gradation rates are abyssmal. In baseball, only 46% of freshmen graduate. In basket ball only 44% of student athletes graduate in six years. Why? Well one reason, I believe is that there is no incentive for student athletes to remain in college when there are so many incentives to leave, i.e. lucrative contracts, endorsement deals, etc.
This trend, along with the trend of recruiting younger and younger players to play in the professional leauges--not developmental leagues, but full-fledged pro leagues, led to this idea. Make a college athletic scholarship a contract--a real enforceable contract--between the school and the athlete, complete with penalties for the breach of that contract.
Here's how the contract would work. The school agrees to provide an education to an athlete, complete with all the support for getting that education available to non-student athletes, including tutoring. The school agrees to waive tuition and board fees, essentially providing the education for free. The student agrees to compete for the glory of the school AND remain at the school for five years (four years of eligibility plus one year of red shirt status). As a student, the athlete must maintain what ever levels of academic achievement the school sets for the student body in general. Thus the school gets legal benefit and the student gets legal benefit and each gives something up.
The consequences of breach are this. For the school who fails to provide adeuqate resources for the athlete to complete his/her education, the school must continue to provide those services at no cost to the student, until the athlete has had a reasonable opportunity to complete the work for a degree. This is not a big deal, since for the most part schools are in the business of providing an education. Additionally, the chances of school's breach in this contract are very small and I can only forsee the cancellation of a sport or a recruiting violation causing suspension of a sport as the only grounds for breach.
For the athlete, the consequences are much more severe. If they leave the school, without graduating, to take a contract as a professional athlete within five years of leaving the school, they must repay the school all of the funds the school lost in supporting their education, namely all the tuition, room, board, fees that the school waived and any allowance given to the student for incidentals. This penalty would not apply to transfer students.
Big deal you say, the new student athlete can afford it out of any signing bonus. But it gets worse. The new professional athlete would forfeit 10 percent (pre-tax) of any signing bonus they receive plus 25 percent of all salary and bonuses they receive for each of the years in which they would have been in college. Thus if a player leaves after two years of college, they would forfeit 25 percent of their pay and bonuses (again, pre-tax) for three years.
Again, given that athletes may have a decade or more of a professional career, this doesn't seem too bad. But I want to make sure the league and, more importantly, the agents, get penalized as well. Thus the league and the player's agent would have to match--dollar for dollar--what the athlete gives up. All of the forfeited funds would go to the general scholarship fund for the school.
What, you may ask, motivates me to make such an unfair imposition on the student athlete. Here it is. By taking a scholarship--that student-athlete did not have to compete against the general student population for a space in the freshman class. Student athletes routinely are admitted into schools who, without the athletic ability of the athlete, would never have admitted them in the first place. SAT scores and GPAs in high school are routinely ignored for athletes--a troubling issue in itself.
As we all know, there are a finite number of spaces in a freshman class-some bigger than others. Thus if a student athlete is given a space, that means another deserving student, perhaps one who could have used the full scholarship given to most athletes, didn't get a spot and the penalties for leaving school early provide a means for the school to make good to those students denied admission or some others like them. The forfeiture of money makes the decision to leave school painful enough to re-think it. Because the penalty for not completing a scholarship contract does not accrue to the school, but it falls on the students denied admission.
For an athlete that leaves school early, the school gets that scholarship space back. But the student who didn't get admitted to allow an athlete to get in means doesn't get the benefit of the education the athlete squanders.
The NCAA owes a duty not only to the student athletes, but to students in general to make sure that althetes are really student-athletes, which in at least in some sports, is a complete misnomer.
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