An NCAA Basketball Idea That Ought to Go Nowhere

This was a news story you needed to read twice.

The NCAA is what?

The NCAA is discussing the possibility of restricting male college basketball players from competing in their freshman seasons?

Only men? Only in basketball?

Huh?

“We’re trying to think creatively,” says Milton Gordon, president of Cal State Fullerton and a member of the NCAA Division I Working Group to Study Basketball Issues.

Some creative thinking, by the way, might be used to come up with another name for this committee, but Gordon says some serious consideration needs to be given to the state of men’s college basketball.

“The percent of male college basketball players who graduate is very low,” Gordon says. “Much lower than for female basketball players.”

Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten and a former chairman of the NCAA tournament selection committee, says that NCAA statistics show 41% of male basketball players get degrees whereas 66% of female basketball players graduate.

“I think a judge would listen to different treatment for men’s basketball if you could demonstrate with data how unhealthy Division I men’s basketball really is,” Delany says. “You would need to have rationale for it.”

And it is no coincidence that Delany would speak of a judge, since the NCAA seems to have a knack for getting itself sued and then losing. Recently, the NCAA has been left on the hook for more than $50 million owed to certain assistant basketball coaches whose salary was, for a time, restricted to $16,000 a year.

Currently facing court challenges are NCAA rules under Proposals 48 and 42, which set freshman eligibility based partly on standardized test scores, which many minority coaches and players say are biased. Already the NCAA has lost one court ruling in this fight.

No one will argue that the graduation rates are poor. But will keeping men from playing for a year change that?

Would Elton Brand have graduated from Duke if he had been made to sit out his freshman season, or would he have turned pro after playing only one year, instead of two? Will players stay in school an extra year to graduate just because they’ve been kept away from basketball as freshmen?

If you love college sports, you should get queasy whenever the NCAA proposes new rules.

There are already books several inches thick filled with them. Rules and regulations that prohibit, for instance, coaches who have become close to a recruit’s parent from attending that parent’s funeral should the death occur during a “down” recruiting period.

But here’s the problem: More rules don’t necessarily produce better behavior.

The NCAA has lots of rules regulating academic and athletic behavior in colleges, but too often no one seems able to enforce them. Witness the ugly scandal that is overtaking the University of Minnesota’s basketball program. Stories of term papers written by academic advisors, athletes avoiding class and then avoiding punishment, and coaches encouraging this behavior.

To reply by not letting male freshmen play basketball doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Even Delany acknowledges that barring freshman males from basketball could encourage them to jump from high school to the NBA draft in even greater numbers.

“But to me, that should not be a primary consideration,” Delany says. “Those players are not going to be [in school] very long anyway. At the end of the day, that’s not an NCAA problem. That’s a problem for the NBA players’ association.”

Here Gordon gently disagrees.

“My feeling has always been that any college experience is better than no college experience,” he says. “I wish all kids that come to Fullerton would go on and graduate, but I also think even a year or two in college benefits everybody, athletes included.”

A more interesting proposal, one being studied by the committee, would limit the number of athletic scholarships a school could offer to the number of student-athletes who eventually get degrees.

“We’re just trying to provide incentives to get kids to think about their degrees,” Gordon says. “No one is trying to create more legislation. We want to create effective legislation.”

Incentives in the guise of more rules don’t seem to make sense. Freshmen have been eligible to play sports in college since 1972. We can’t make any clock go backward nearly 30 years, whether we wish we could or not.

Ultimately, individual coaches, athletic directors and college presidents must demand ethical behavior. At the schools where that happens, there are fewer problems. Even at Duke, you can’t keep talented kids from accepting millions of dollars to become professional athletes after a year or two in college. But does anyone think Brand or William Avery or Corey Maggette did not benefit from attending classes at Duke?

Nothing is a done deal, Gordon says. And maybe some members of this committee floated this proposal, as so many politicians do, to gauge reaction and see if it makes sense.

It doesn’t. Good behavior, ethical behavior, can’t be legislated. Making male freshman basketball players scapegoats for schools that look the other way when athletes are allowed to skimp on the classwork, or for coaches who don’t pay attention to agents hanging around, or to players who suddenly are driving $30,000 SUVs, won’t solve any problems.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.