Commentary : Proposition 42 Is a Flawed Step in Right Direction for College Athletes

What the world needs is not another basketball player. There seem to be few ways a man can feed his family with a skill for bouncing a ball if he can’t add, subtract and multiply.

That’s the greater fact lost in all the sound and fury over the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s flawed proposal that says athletes have to be able to read and write a little bit before they can get scholarships.

If that means the level of athletes who play above the rim is diminished, that’s OK. The role of the university is in developing people who will elevate the community, not in turning out professional athletes.

The NCAA is in the business of regulating some kind of equality in college competition so that a school that fields a team of history majors doesn’t have to go against a team full of basketball majors. That was the basic intent of rule 5-1-J, better known as Proposition 48, which seemed to be working.

The NCAA has no business determining whom a university can give a grant-in-aid, which is the purpose of Proposition 42. When John Thompson refuses to be at courtside when Georgetown plays basketball, he’s saying the NCAA should mind its business.

That denying scholarships is wrong does not mean that the standards it demands are wrong. What Thompson doesn’t acknowledge is that new rules are brought about because coaches find a way to subvert old rules. They cheat. University officials do nothing about it. High schools abet it. Parents applaud it. And players exploit it.

Proposition 48, now 3 years old, said that an incoming freshman had to have scored at least 700 on the SAT and have had a C average in an 11-course core curriculum or he was ineligible to compete as a freshman. He could be on scholarship with either qualification, however, and if he and the school worked at it, he could become eligible.

There were about 600 of those scholarship students each year, and there’s no count of how many were turned away completely. If the student couldn’t make the standard, he didn’t belong in college. Not everybody does.

The NCAA rushed to reinforce that regulation with no data, no information on how many of those casualties improved to meet the standard and no information on how those students progressed.

The argument that even those who didn’t meet academic standards benefitted from being at college is a deception. The coach still has 15 scholarships in basketball and 95 in football at his disposal. He could give them to people who were slightly less talented athletes but were interested in being educated and were just as underprivileged.

A university, especially a public institution, is obligated to admit some marginal students, to give them opportunity to make up for the inequities of schools and community background, and to help them meet the costs. Now a recruited athlete cannot get that help from the institution. That’s wrong.

But determination of who goes to college should be made on academic standards rather than athletic standards. Coaches have been known to exploit the loophole in Proposition 48 that says a student with an overall C average can get a scholarship. Coaches willing to wait a year for the talent can tell a recruit to fatten his average with shop and gym classes and not to worry about core classes or his SAT score. That’s not the purpose of high school.

Ultimately, the message would have to sift down to the family and the community, making them realize that a tiny fraction of college athletes make a living as professional athletes and that a tiny fraction of high school athletes win college scholarships; the huge majority has to find another way to make a living.

If colleges were honestly intent on helping the situation and not in saving money, they would make all freshmen ineligible for varsity and strictly limit freshman competition. That would give the young athlete a chance to adjust to being in college before he was responsible for competition. They would make scholarships good for five years, not renewable each year by the coach.

The SAT is an inexact measurement, but it is an effort to level the playing field. It says that high schools that inflate grades will be found out. The argument that demanding a 700 SAT score is culturally biased against black athletes and students in schools that have no SAT program is another deception. Immigrant Asian students who have far more cultural disadvantage roar through the SAT, but then there are few Asians with ambition to be professional athletes.

A 700 score is below 77 percent of the test scores and below bias. The thought that a student who can’t get 700 can go through the grind of practice, meetings and travel and make college academic standards is a disservice to all but a tiny few.

“We’re not talking about high standards on those tests,” Harry Edwards said of Proposition 48. “In fact, they’re almost minimal. How low can standards get? I think black educators are underestimating the capabilities of black athletes as students. The dumb athlete is not born, he is systematically created. The language of the streets just won’t do. The language of this country is not going to change. And athletes can be important role models for other kids. Get the athletes studying and we may get the rest of them to crack the books.”

That is the point.