Silliness

With all of the scandals that have plagued college athletics over the past year (hey - if you see Larry Eustachy please buy him a Natty Light for me to celebrate his new coaching gig) the NCAA is reportedly looking into studying graduation rates. This is hypocritical and pointless. We're talking about dozens of universitiies that look the other way when sex parties and alcohol are provided to teenagers during recruiting trips (allegedly). If that sort of thing is happening before the student-athletes are enrolled and on campus, who knows what's happening on a typical Friday or Saturday night.

Does anyone really think that if the NCAA starts monitoring graduation rates it will actually improve the education that student-athletes are getting? I for sure don't. Sure - graduation rates are likely to go up, but that will likely only result in devaluing the diplomas others of us earned from these same universities. If a university needs to improve its graduation rates in order to earn a bowl bid or to get an invite to the NCAA basketball tournament, the easiest thing to do will be to start graduating kids, even if it involves fake grades. A simple incentive of monitoring or requiring minimum graduation rates won't do anything except encourage even more cheating. Hopefully the NCAA won't do something as naive as this which will only make the problem worse.

In other news, the University of Miami is allegedly looking into buying out men's basketball coach Perry Clark and replacing him with former St. John's coach Mike Jarvis. Great. The University is looking to spend $2.5 million to buy out a coach who can't win in order to replace him with a coach who couldn't win with his last program (formerly a perennial national power) and whose players got out of rape charges this season by taping their encounter with a stripper on their cellphones.