Hornung’s Nest Stings Colleges Over Black Athletes; NCAA Data Damning

Bill Alexander, BET.com, April 1

While Paul Hornung has offered an apology for saying Notre Dame should lower its academic standards “to get Black athletes,” his comments have focused on competitive college sport frenzies that use African Americans as cannon fodder.

Black student-athletes bring in the bucks to erect new buildings and hike faculty salaries, but they are often used up and tossed out without a degree once their service to the college or university sports department is over.:: AD ::

According to the latest NCAA graduation data, 16 of the 65 teams selected for the “March Madness” playoffs had player graduation rates of 25 percent or less. Four of the schools did not graduate a single basketball player within the six years of the study. Of the four teams in the final “Sweet 16,” only four schools — Duke, Kansas, Vanderbilt and Xavier — had graduation rates of 50 percent or better.

“What we’ve got is one out of 100 student-athletes able to make a living out of their sport, documented recruiting violations, academic fraud, an overemphasis by the TV networks on commercialism and coaches who make 10 times the salary of the college’s president — this has got to stop,” former University of North Carolina President William Friday tells Bet.com.

Friday, now the executive director of Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, says “we have created an entertainment industry [that] has eroded the integrity of the university.”

Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, has said that his own studies over the past 10 years found that more than 50 Division I basketball programs had failed to graduate even one African American player.

Floyd Keith, a 30-year basketball coach and now into his third-year as executive director of the Black Coaches Association, tells Bet.com that the Black student-athlete needs to speak up about his education.

“It’s a two-way street. They need to demand that their education program be followed. They shouldn’t accept less.”

Keith says that coaches are often needlessly “maligned” by critics who do not understand that they must deal with student attitudes “perpetuated by the media” that glorifies their college days as a “stopgap on the way to the money.”

Keith and Friday both believe that the new NCAA entrance requirements that de-emphasize SAT scores will make it easier to get in colleges and universities, while the sequenced phasing in of required coursework will make it more likely the student-athletes will get a degree.

The so-called incentive/disincentive plan expected scheduled to be adopted this month would boot out of postseason play all NCAA-member teams who do not perform well academically. Millions of dollars in scholarship money would also dry up. Those teams who perform well in the classroom, however, would be entitled to more revenue and scholarships, plus additional graduate assistant coaches.

“The HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) are going to suffer,” says Keith, “because they cannot afford to fund the support services, such as individual academic advising, to keep the athletes in school.”

As for Hornung’s comments, they were best answered by Michael Wilbon, the African American sports columnist for The Washington Post . “Notre Dame’s football team has [B]lack players, and lots of them,” he writes. “In fact, 55 percent of Notre Dame’s players are [B]lack, which is higher than the national average among Division I-A schools. [The problem] is the team’s reputation for running an archaic offense that turns off kids who dream of playing in the NFL some day.”

Notre Dame spokesman Chris Masters tells Bet.com that the school’s African American student-athlete graduation rate is 78 percent — “sixth in the nation.” The school’s football team is coached by Tyrone Willingham, an African American.