Key Vote Due : NCAA Rule Could Clear the Bench

For four years, Patrick Ewing was one of the biggest names in Washington.

The 7-foot center for Georgetown University’s basketball team was a three-time All-American and led his team to the national finals in 1982, 1984 and 1985.

An intimidating shot blocker and a powerful rebounder, Ewing was the college Player of the Year last year and was the first player chosen in the professional draft. Last summer, he signed a contract with the New York Knicks reportedly worth more than $17 million.

But Ewing’s success as an athlete was no surprise. As a high school senior, he was the nation’s most highly recruited player, and according to many scouts, could have played professionally at age 19.

What is surprising is that Ewing earned a degree from Georgetown, a university with high academic standards and one that doesn’t give credits for courses such as physical education.

Early Warning

When Ewing was being recruited, his high school coach warned college officials that he would need daily tutoring, including help with his reading and in taking notes in class.

Although Georgetown officials refuse to discuss Ewing’s high school academic record, citing confidentiality rules, coaches and admissions directors from other universities who recruited him said his test scores and grades were very low.

But unlike many athletes, Ewing brought the same drive to the classroom that he showed on the basketball court. According to fellow students and school officials, he took an interest in his courses and studied hard. Before his senior year, he passed up a possible multimillion-dollar pro basketball contract in order to finish his degree.

On Monday, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. will take a final vote on a national academic standard that would likely have barred Ewing from gaining a scholarship at Georgetown.

Three years ago, the NCAA approved a rule that says freshmen athletes, beginning this fall, will need a 2.0 grade average (equivalent to all Cs) in 11 academic courses and a 700 combined score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (or a 15 on the American College Test) to be eligible to play for Division 1 colleges and universities.

Rule Pushed Through

Irked by revelations of how their athletic departments had made a sham of academic requirements, prominent university presidents went to that 1983 NCAA convention and pushed the new rules through.

Even though a 700 on the SAT is, as USC President James Zumberge put it, “an embarrassingly low score” for students entering top universities, college presidents said then that the new rules would at least create a minimum national standard.

But a year later, the NCAA jarred its own members by releasing an analysis of the academic records of 16,000 athletes who entered college in 1977. If the new academic rules had been in effect then, only 18% of black males and 57% of white males would have qualified.

Since then, the dispute over the academic rules has intensified, driving a wedge between officials of white and black colleges, many of whom say the college board tests are unfair to poor and black students.

“These institutions have built their big stadiums and their big treasuries on the backs of black athletes, and now they are saying the solution is to get rid of them,” said Joseph Johnson, president of Louisiana’s predominantly black Grambling University, who has introduced a motion for Monday’s NCAA meeting in New Orleans to have the test requirement dropped.

Program Threatened

“The solution isn’t to do away with these kids, but to provide opportunities and to educate them like Georgetown does,” said Johnson, who added that Grambling’s traditionally powerful football program could be decimated by imposition of the new rules.

According to the college board, on a scale ranging from 400 to 1,600, black students scored an average of 722 on the SAT in 1985, while white students averaged 940.

The college board test demands that students understand complex mathematics and the nuances of sophisticated vocabulary words.

Black students in general “have never been exposed to certain things that you need to do well on those tests,” Johnson said. “You can call it cultural bias or something else, but I just say it’s unfair.”

He and other critics of the test score rule say that Patrick Ewing and hundreds of other athletes entered college with poor test scores, but went on to earn college degrees.

But other university presidents, who are expected to hold the majority of the votes at the New Orleans convention, say Ewing is the great exception, noting that most students with his record would never be admitted and would not graduate if they were.

Value Questioned

“You can take a kid and hold his hand for four years, and he’ll graduate, but what does that mean?” said Art Padilla, vice president for academic affairs in the University of North Carolina system, a staunch booster of the new academic requirements.

“In the past 10 years, the admissions standards for athletes have disappeared. They’re a joke. We don’t think a student who scores zero on a college board test ought to be competing his freshmen year. He ought to be studying,” Padilla said.

He referred to Chris Washburn, a 6-foot-11 basketball player whose experience at North Carolina State has prompted a statewide crackdown on college athletics.

In 1984, despite an abysmal high school academic record, Washburn was among the most highly recruited freshmen basketball players in the country. However, on a pre-season team trip to Greece, Washburn was accused of shoplifting. In September, 1984, he was convicted of assaulting a woman on the school campus in Raleigh and given a 30-day suspended sentence. Finally, in December, he was convicted of stealing $800 in stereo equipment from a dormitory room.

At his trial, it was revealed that Washburn scored a 200 on one section of the SAT, equivalent to zero. He scored 270 out of a possible 800 on the other section, for a combined score of 470. The average SAT score for North Carolina State freshmen is 1,030.

Back in Action

Washburn recently served a day in jail on his theft conviction, and is now back in action as the center for the North Carolina State basketball team.

The Washburn story has a familiar ring to UCLA officials. In 1980, a highly recruited junior linebacker, Billy Don Jackson, was dropped from the football squad after repeatedly skipping practice. Two years later, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the stabbing death of a West Los Angeles drug dealer.

Court testimony revealed that Jackson was a “functional illiterate.” He had been admitted to UCLA in 1977 without taking the standard admissions test and for two years had been given courses such as “sports broadcasting,” which hid the fact that he couldn’t read.

“I can tell you that a guy like this (Washburn) is not the Lone Ranger. Every Division 1 school has kids with that kind of (academic) record, and if they deny it, they’re lying,” Padilla said.

Stunned by the Washburn case, the board of governors of the University of North Carolina ordered a study of athletic programs at that school’s 16 campuses. The study found that this fall, more than 40% of the athletes at North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had SAT scores of under 700. At East Carolina University, 35% scored under 600.

Word From Board

The North Carolina board, taking the decision out of the hands of its coaches, athletic directors and even campus presidents, recently passed a motion telling all of its campus representatives at the New Orleans NCAA meeting to vote against any move to weaken the new academic requirements.

Besides the black colleges, which want the test score rule dropped, a third set of university officials, including the heads of several California campuses, say they might back a modified plan that would lower the test score standard to 660 this year and raise it to 680 in 1987.

“I would prefer the rule go into effect as it is, but it would have a terribly negative impact on black male athletes. We ought to give it some time,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman, who is chairman of the President’s Commission for NCAA Division 1.

In preparation for the final vote, NCAA officials re-analyzed figures from their earlier study, noting that many of the students who were disqualified didn’t take enough academic courses, a deficiency that presumably could be easily corrected. Moreover, SAT scores, especially for black students, have been creeping upward. Last week, NCAA officials said their latest analysis suggests that half to two-thirds of black athletes who had enrolled in recent years would be disqualified this fall under the new academic rules. Similarly, they estimate that about one-fourth of white athletes would be barred.

Looks to Future

Heyman, the Berkeley chancellor, says he believes that high school athletes will score higher on the college board test in the future because of the new requirement to take 11 academic courses.

“If they are taking academic courses rather than garbage, I think we’ll see an improvement in those scores,” he said.

Zumberge, who along with UCLA Chancellor Charles Young was a prime mover behind the new rules at the 1983 meeting, said he hopes the academic standards will “send a message to the high schools. I think it’s time they start preparing these (athletes) for college and stop awarding diplomas that have no meaning.”

But several high school coaches in Los Angeles said the message hasn’t gotten through to their seniors, the first graduating group that will have to meet the new standards.

“We have a couple of guys who could go Division 1 who are on the borderline. They are short one or two classes,” said Paul Knox, football coach at Dorsey High School, whose team includes several all-city players. “I’m bothered that our counselors didn’t know about the rules and make sure they got the right courses.” Knox said that several of his top players recently took the SAT, leaving them little chance to improve if their scores are low.

Rule as Motivation

Some coaches say they believe the new rules will force some of their best athletes who have not tried hard in class to buckle down and do better. But they say many other students have severe academic problems that won’t be remedied quickly.

For example, leading candidates for The Times’ All-City Football Team this season were asked to supply basic information about themselves. One student described his position on the team as “defence of tackal.” Another mentioned his “assits” and “inteceptions” and added that his first choice among colleges was “Airizona.”

If some high schools haven’t reacted to the tougher policies, college recruiters have.

“They used to come here and ask to talk to the young man and see his films,” said Knox, the Dorsey High coach. “Now, the first thing they want to see is the transcript.”

Knox sees one other effect. “It’s going to be great for junior college sports,” he said. The NCAA rule says only that students who do not qualify may not play or practice as freshmen. They could, however, go to a community college and later transfer to a four-year university.

Critics of the new rules reject the view that the real problem lies with high schools. Instead, they blame the major universities for failing to enforce their own admissions requirements.

Wide Variations

At Grambling and most other black colleges in the South, the average freshman enters with a SAT score below 700. But at USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Stanford, typical freshman scores range from 1,050 to 1,400 on the college board test.

“No one wants to say it, but colleges vary greatly. A reasonable score at one school might be terrible at another,” said former Stanford admissions director Fred Hargadon, now senior vice president of the college board in New York.

A student who scored 680 would have a good chance of succeeding at Grambling, but might be hopelessly lost at Berkeley or Stanford, he said.

Hargadon has suggested that the NCAA require colleges to graduate a high percentage of scholarship athletes and to take away scholarships from schools whose graduation rate falls below the standard.

But the presidents, athletic directors and coaches at major universities have wanted no part of such a rule because schools with the lowest academic standard would have a big edge in recruiting.

Officials at Georgetown don’t apologize for taking some students with low test scores. In fact, admissions director Charles Deacon said the university searches out students from Washington schools who have excellent grades, but poor test scores. USC officials say they do the same in Los Angeles.

Examples of Success

“We have plenty of examples of students with low scores and high motivation who’ve made it,” Deacon said. “At the low end of the scale, we’ve found very little correlation between test scores and success.”

He said Georgetown admits about 40 students a year with poor scores, only two or three of whom are likely to be athletes, he said. About 90% of those students go on to graduate, Deacon said.

Officials also credit basketball coach John Thompson for the academic success of his athletes. Thompson, who keeps a deflated basketball on his desk to remind his athletes to think beyond their playing days, has seen 44 of his 46 scholarship players earn degrees at Georgetown.

Georgetown President Timothy Healy said he would side with the black colleges in voting to drop the test score requirement. “Using SAT as a cutoff is crazy; it puts too much emphasis on the test,” Healey said. “If I thought it was fair, I would vote for it.”

But most major college presidents say they are in no mood to trust each campus and its athletic department to enforce academic standards, since so many have failed to do so. But Heyman, the Berkeley chancellor, also says that the majority will resist any move to drop the new test score requirement.

“The SAT is the policeman. It is the one objective measure. The kid’s grade point average depends on who is in control of the curriculum,” Heyman said.

“Besides, I don’t see this as a radical step. It’s a very modest requirement,” he added. “We have gone through 20 years now of having big-time athletics split off from academics. We weaned these kids on sports, courted them and not expected them to do anything in class. This is a small step in the opposite direction.”

GEORGETOWN REVENUES AND BASKETBALL’S PATRICK EWING

How much was Patrick Ewing worth to Georgetown University? A Washington magazine recently calculated that the basketball star brought in more than $12 million during his four-year career.

ATTENDANCE Annual average before center Patrick Ewing joined team 57,739

Annual average with Ewing $158,336

Additional income (1 year) $1,106,567

Additional income (4 years) $4,426,268

TELEVISION Estimated additional games televised during Ewing years 12

Estimated additional network payments to school $1,800,000

NCAA TOURNAMENT NCAA payments to Georgetown for reaching Final Four $2,250,000

PROMOTION Estimated increased sales of hats, shirts etc. (4 years) $400,000

ADMISSION FEES Yearly average of applications before 1982 season 8,600

Applications in 1984 11,128

Total increase 3,653

(x $30, the application fee) $109,590

ALUMNI AND DEVELOPMENT Total fund-raising, 1981 (pre-Ewing) $22,500,000

Average fund-raising 1982-85 $31,000,000

Difference over four years $34,000,000

Assuming 10% resulted from basketball success $3,400,000

TOTAL $12,385,858 EXPENSES (Four-year scholarship) $48,600 NET PROFIT $12,337,258