Titans Take 39 Steps Toward Eligibility : A Summer Spent in the Classroom Can Keep Cal State Fullerton Football Players on the Field

A quick peek inside Fullerton Coach Gene Murphy’s worst nightmare . . . It’s Saturday, Sept 7, 1985. The place is Missoula, Mont., and the Titans of Cal State Fullerton, winners of 11 of 12 games last year, are in town to open their football season against the Grizzlies.

A few hours before kickoff, the Titans pull up to Dornblase Stadium in their team van.

Team van?

At the wheel is Murphy and he doesn’t quite know how to break the news. Scattered behind him are the few players lucky enough to make the team and the trip. Not coincidentally, they also made the Dean’s List.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Murphy says to Montana Coach Larry Donovan. “You’re probably wondering where the rest of the team is. You’d better sit down, Larry.”

Murphy explains how he would have brought his offense along but it seems the unit didn’t quite make it through summer school classes. You know how that goes. Same goes for his defense and the special teams.

“Are you sure we couldn’t interest your guys in a game of chess instead, Larry?”

Wake up Gene, wake up, it’s only a dream . . .

Or is it?

Chances are that come September the sky will be blue and the Titans will arrive in Montana with enough players to field a team, but just the thought of playing eight-man football is giving Murphy the summertime blues.

He jokingly refers to this summer school tale as his “Roy Campanella.” The former Dodger catcher wore number 39, and that happens to be the same number of Fullerton football players currently attending classes to ensure their eligibility for the upcoming season.

That’s right. Thirty-nine players .

The majority will make it through, assures Alison Cone, Titan Academic Coordinator, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be some tense moments and late-night cramming sessions.

“We have some guys that are critical,” Murphy said as he watched his season flash before his eyes.

Because of the time needed to process grades, Murphy won’t know about the status of many of his players until a few days before the first game.

So what’s the problem at Fullerton?

Has the school been recruiting too many half-wits who can’t get through Wall Watching 101?

It’s no secret that in past years the Titans, wedged in a highly competitive recruiting area, have taken in the borderline student-athlete that some other universities wouldn’t take a chance on.

But that doesn’t fairly account for the extraordinarily high number of Fullerton players currently in summer school.

Actually, the Titans are feeling the initial crunch of the normal progress academic rule the administration put into affect three years ago regarding student-athletes.

Fullerton, going above and beyond the governing rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., required its student-athletes to takes courses that will lead them toward a specific degree. At Fullerton, in other words, a football player can’t simply take enough electives to stay eligible for a given semester.

Murphy has been through this before.

Last season was the best in Fullerton football history. The Titans were 11-1 last season and once even cracked UPI’s top 20 poll.

But does anyone realize just how close the Titans were to being just another team?

A week before last year’s opener, the academic status of several star players, including All-PCAA quarterback Damon Allen and linebacker John Nevens, were in question.

Allen, selected as one of the nation’s top 10 quarterbacks in 1984, barely made the 2.0 GPA required at Fullerton to remain eligible.

Of course, the Titans without Allen would have been like Sonny without Cher.

Nevens, an All-USFL linebacker for the Denver Gold last season, entered last season with a 1.98 GPA, but, through the graces of the Fullerton administration, was allowed to play.

Most of the players affected at Fullerton are juniors and seniors who are entering upper-division core classes. Some are struggling to keep up.

“In previous years, they could take the classes they know they could get through,” said Cone, who closely monitors the progress of Fullerton athletes. “Now, they’re left with the tough ones.”

The NCAA, which has been steadily upgrading its academic standards, imposed its blanket normal progress rule for all institutions last August.

“The thing that’s tough,” Murphy said, “is that we started three years ahead of everybody else.”

Meet the Cal State Guinea Pigs.

What also hurts Fullerton is that Murphy made a commitment five years ago to recruit heavily from the high school level rather than relying on junior college transfers.

And anyone who ever blew a whistle knows it’s much easier to keep a player eligible for two years than four.

As one coach put it during the height of academic scandals in college athletics, “I could keep a cockroach eligible for two years.”

Murphy isn’t arguing that his school shouldn’t upgrade its standards.

He is aware that college athletics are still trying to ward off the black cloud that still looms overhead, the residue left by one academic scandal after another.

Who could forget cases such as that of UCLA’s Billy Don Jackson, a player who emerged from one of the nation’s most prestigious universities as a functional illiterate.

Murphy’s complaint is that not all schools play by the same academic rules. Why should normal progress so affect his players and not others, he wonders.

Of the eight football-playing schools in the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn., Fullerton is one of only three that makes its athletes abide by a minimum 2.0 grade point average rule.

Murphy’s classic case study is offensive guard, Darryl Titsworth, affectionately known around the Fullerton campus as the “300-pound sacrificial lamb.”

Titsworth was declared academically ineligible last year and missed the Titans’ 11-1 season. But Titsworth was eligible to compete under NCAA rules.

He would have been eligible to play at any other school in the PCAA last season, with the possible exception of University of the Pacific, a private school with high academic standards.

But Titsworth did not qualify under the rules imposed at Fullerton. He had completed all the necessary classes and units required under normal progress, but fell slightly below the 2.0 GPA.

“The only thing I didn’t like about it was that they started it (normal progress) so late,” said Titsworth, a fifth-year senior who’s back on the team this season. “To start with a senior who was almost through with his eligibility, well, it was kind of disheartening.”

But Titsworth isn’t bitter over the decision to declare him ineligible, which was made Fullerton’s Faculty Representative, Dr. Pat Wegner.

“He told me that he had nothing against me,” Titsworth said of his meeting with Wegner. “He just thought I could do better as a person. And he was right. I wanted to play last year, but maybe I shouldn’t have played. My dad thinks it was good for me. When you sit out a year, you get time to evaluate yourself and the mistakes that you made.”

Still, Murphy didn’t think the decision was equitable.

“Why should the rules at one state institution be different from another?” he asked. “What I’d like to see is conference uniformity. But I don’t know if it will ever be.”

To understand why requires sifting through the sometimes ambiguous rules of the NCAA, which are about as easy to explain as the meaning of life.

The NCAA has established a basic set of rules by which all college athletes must abide.

To remain eligible for participation, an athlete must remain in good academic standing at his institution. An athlete must also complete a minimum of 24 semester units a year or 34 quarter units and declare a major by his fifth semester or junior season. The NCAA does not have a 2.0 rule.

Last August, the NCAA added the normal progress rule to the standard, but there has already been confusion over the definition of the term.

Any school, though, can enact academic rules above the NCAA standard.

“If anything, we’re more encouraged if someone’s setting stricter standards,” said Kathleen Hatke, an NCAA legislative assistant.

That’s what Fullerton did three years ago when it instituted its normal progress rule. And it is even more clearly defined than the NCAA’s.

The NCAA does not require an athlete to declare a major until his fifth semester, which allows much more flexibility in course selection during the first two years. At Fullerton, though, an athlete must take required core classes (general education) his first four semesters whether he has declared a major or not.

Enter the plight of the coach, who walks a tightrope between making his team a winner and getting his players to the graduation podium on time.

He doesn’t get much sympathy from school administrators.

“A university is for academics,” Wegner said. “We must put academics first. Within those guidelines, we want the best academic framework an institution can have.”

Make no mistake about it. Fullerton isn’t Harvard. It isn’t even UOP. But Murphy is right. A recent survey of PCAA schools by The Times showed that it is tougher being a football player at Fullerton than most other conference schools.

Of course, the survey excluded two schools (UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara) from the academically stringent University of California system because they do not field football teams.

Aside from Fullerton, the only other schools in the conference with 2.0 rules are UOP and San Jose State.

As far as academics, Pacific, a private institution, outclasses the field simply because its admission requirements are tougher to begin with, meaning it gets a better brand of students out of high school.

San Jose State also has a 2.0 rule and it instituted a normal progress rule a year before the NCAA did.

The other remaining football schools in the PCAA (Utah State, Cal State Long Beach, Nevada Las Vegas, New Mexico State and Fresno State) do not have requirements above the NCAA minimum.

Murphy doesn’t think that’s equitable and believes there should be some academic uniformity within the conference.

Idealistically, it sounds like a good idea. Realistically, though, most doubt it will happen in the near future.

The reason has to do with diversity within the conference.

The PCAA has one private school (Pacific), two UC schools (Santa Barbara and Irvine), four California State Universities (Fullerton, Long Beach, San Jose and Fresno) and three out-of-state schools (New Mexico, UNLV and Utah State).

“We have all different types of academic missions,” PCAA Commissioner Lew Cryer said.

The schools in the Ivy League, for instance, are willing to sacrifice a drop-off in overall quality to maintain high academic standards. But the academic and athletic climate in the PCAA is diverse.

Administrators at UOP, for instance, would never be willing to compromise their academic standards.

“Our people would not budge one minute,” said Carl Miller, UOP Athletic Director. “Our admissions people would laugh at me.”

UNLV, on the other hand, isn’t likely to increase its standards to UOP’s level.

Yes, different academic missions.

Because it can only recruit a certain type of student-athlete, UOP realizes it will be more difficult for the school to compete for the PCAA title. UNLV, on the other hand, usually has more talent and depth than other PCAA schools.

Of course, sometimes they pay the price. The Rebels won the PCAA title in football last season, but were forced to forfeit the championship when seven players were discovered to be academically ineligible.

The topic of conference uniformity, though, was brought up at a meeting of PCAA Faculty Representatives last May in Newport Beach.

“It was split right down the middle,” said Dennis Farrell, assistant PCAA commissioner. “There is still a strong feeling for individual prerogative.”

And if, hypothetically, the PCAA were to decide on having a uniform 2.0 rule throughout the conference, would that settle the argument?

Is a 2.0 at Pacific the same as a 2.0 at Long Beach?

Rod Tueller, the Athletic Director and basketball coach at Utah State, is against conference uniformity.

“I think you have to have autonomy of individual institutions.” he said. “If a school feels it wants its standards higher the NCAA, that’s great.”

But is it unfair to coaches?

“Hey, is it unfair for me to recruit with snow when you have sunshine down there?” Tueller asked. “Let’s have snow everywhere.”

The NCAA, though, is working on at least trying to make things more equitable for everyone.

Beginning next August, a new admissions rule for student-athletes will go into effect that will require all high school seniors to have a cumulative 2.0 GPA in a core curriculum of 11 academic courses, including three years of English, two years of math and two years of social or physical science. All incoming student-athletes will also be required to have at least a combined score of 700 on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in verbal and mathematics.

There is no question the standards are getting tougher.

“When it all comes down in the wash, this is a response to all the academic scandals we had at the beginning of the decade where players were taken in by coaches, used and then cast out in the world with no education,” Farrell said.

The bottom line, of course, is whether the new rules are working.

Because the normal progress rule has only been in effect for three years at Fullerton, there is no statistical evidence that could indicate more student-athletes are graduating.

“But just by eyeballing it, those who are sticking it out are much closer to graduating,” said Cone, the academic coordinator at Fullerton. “But it also encourages some to give up. But I’m sure our statistics will be much better.”

They will be if Darryl Titsworth keeps his promise.

“I’m going to get my degree some day, that’s for sure,” he said.

Titsworth is a criminal justice major. He said that if he really buckles down, he might be able to graduate by the end of this, his fifth year. If not, he vows he’ll come back to earn the rest of the units needed.

No one will be happier for that fact than Murphy. But he believes that it has now become more difficult for an athlete to graduate on time.

Long Beach Athletic Director John Kasser agrees.

“Very few people graduate in four years now,” he said. “How long does it take the normal student to graduate? It’s six years.”

Murphy’s players are put on a schedule that would have them graduating in five years.

“It’s a Catch 22 for a coach who’s also an educator,” said Murphy, who holds master’s degrees in physical education and secondary administration. “As an educator, you want to see your kids graduate. But how long does it take the normal student to graduate?

“If my son Tim (a Fullerton sophomore) gets a 2.7 GPA, I’m all over him. But we’re not dealing with clones. We’re dealing with good students and bad ones. It’s the same thing in football when you run wind sprints. You don’t run a lineman as much as a wide receiver.”

So will Fullerton field a football team this year. Probably. Will the discussion over student-athletes ever end? Probably not.

Said Murphy: “You can argue this thing till the cows come home.”