Nearly two years before the NCAA rolled out a new database intended to hold head coaches accountable for the academic performance of the athletes they recruit, two professors at the University of Oklahoma had their own idea of how best to inspire what they called “academically responsible behavior” among coaches.
In a 2008 article in The Chronicle, Gerald S. Gurney and Jerome C. Weber argued that if the NCAA wanted to measure how well, or how poorly, head coaches were encouraging their athletes to hit the books, all it had to do was track the graduation rates of every athlete a coach recruited and link those rates to the coaches. In creating this “Coaches Graduation Rate,” as they called it, the NCAA could provide an incentive for coaches to pay closer attention to athletes’ academic backgrounds.
That’s not quite the way it turned out.
The database the NCAA unveiled today, dubbed the Division I Head Coaches APR Portfolio, links coaches not to the graduation-success rates of their teams, as Gurney and Weber suggested, but to those teams’ annual academic-progress rates. It might sound like a matter of semantics to anyone unfamiliar with NCAA-speak. But the distinction is huge, says Gurney, who is senior associate athletic director for academics and student life and an adjunct professor at Oklahoma.
Graduation rates, like the one calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, or the NCAA’s own graduation-success rate, are fairly straightforward figures, he says. And although they’re far from perfect, he argues, they make good tools for consumers—in this case, prospective athletes looking to learn about a coach’s academic priorities.
The academic-progress rate, which measures the eligibility and retention of athletes, is a different story, he says. And by including it in the new database, the NCAA has set forth a “meaningless metric” as the latest installment in its continuing campaign for academic reform.
“It does not tell a consumer or a parent or a prospect or the public that an individual coach is better or worse at academics because of their score,” Gurney says. “This only tells you, Is the academic-support unit at that institution good or bad at keeping students eligible and retained? It doesn’t say anything about the coaches.”
NCAA officials say the academic-progress rate is useful because it offers a “real time” snapshot of how teams are doing in the classroom. Graduation rates, by contrast, require six years to take shape.
Gurney says the new metric may place additional pressure on academic-support professionals already concerned about avoiding penalties triggered by teams’ low academic-progress rates. (Under the current system, teams that fail to reach a certain benchmark score may be penalized by the NCAA, but the new metric for coaches does not include any threat of penalties for coaches who preside over low-scoring teams.)
“Now the reputations of the coaches are at stake,” Gurney says. That may place athletes in a tight spot with their academic advisers. “They have to be asking a question, and that is, Are you giving me advice that is in my best interest? The best interest of my coach? The university? The team? The athletic department? Which is it? And so it breaks down the trust relationships of individual counselors working with student-athletes.”
7 Responses to A ‘Meaningless Metric’?
rburns - August 6, 2010 at 8:35 am
If indeed this puts the reputations of the coaches at stake we can expect that universities and their athletic programs will do anything and everything necessary to twist the situation in ways to protect, even to enhance those reputations–regardless of reality. The universities have invested too much, swallowed too much, overlooked too much scandal to go back now to a time when academics were more important than the fan base and its focus on the scoreboard. The programs use the “students” to score enough points to claim success. The “students” use the programs to get them to the big money. Any other goals, any other objectives are so much smoke and mirrors to provide parents, fans/alumni, presidents and boards cover for the real greed for money and fame that is at the base of it all. Do we really want to pretend that degree completion and GPA’s are important as the trend toward “one and out” is what it all is about? Universities spend their money to recruit top “student/athletes” (now a truly meaningless term)with the understanding on all parts that real success for everybody involved will see the player use the university program for a single year as a step toward a pro contract?Of course those who travel that road to millions are the exceptions, but all of the players and their supporters are sure they will be those exceptions, and so the programs and the process set up to try to make it happen. In this environment of money and PR, do grades and academic advisement really mean anything at all? We see in scandal after scandal, penalty after penalty, championship after championship that the coachs’ reputations are based in games won–nothing else, NOTHING else matters. As the most current example see the conviction of a woman in Louisville charged with extortion and lies to the FBI regarding Louisville’s Coach Pitino and their 15 second sexual intercourse in a closed bar (it is Pitino’s testimony that his experience with her was sexual intercourse and lasted 15 seconds). All parties involved, the trial showed, are of questionable character, including several staff of Louisville’s basketball program beyond Pitino. But the AD says he is proud of Pitino for putting all the facts out there (even those facts, I guess, that indicate misuse of program funds and staff and a general environment of sleeze. The woman’s only chance to survive would have been if she were also the head coach of an NCAA Division I basketball team with a positive win/loss record. That being the case, she and Pitino could have screwed around with one another with no negative impact on either career or reputation. Anything is acceptable if Coach is a winner on the court. And that includes the players’ academic failures.
22205373 - August 6, 2010 at 9:16 am
Actually, colleges 50 and 80 years ago were far worse about buying players who never studied than they are today. There was never a golden era of student-athletics. But it’s too bad graduation-rate isn’t the benchmark. It’s fitting that the superior plan was proposed by the University of Oklahoma–penance for Barry Switzer’s era of Football-Incorporated a generation ago.
rburns - August 6, 2010 at 10:05 am
You are right on target. The “student-athlete” was a fiction from the beginning.
11272784 - August 6, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Athletes are already graduating at a higher rate than the general student population – which should be no surprise, given the extra tutoring and support they’re given by their athletic mentors.The NCAA has already loaded too much on coaches – I don’t like this idea.
newmat - August 6, 2010 at 2:36 pm
The NCAA is merely a legitimizing agency for Division 1 sports progams. We all know that all an important intercollegiate athlete has to do to achieve a passing grade is to show up in class, submit a paper writtten largely by one of the academic support unit people who wants to keep his/her job, and stay out of trouble. And the college authorities can’t even get them to do that!So fergetaboutit. It’s nice entertainment for the alums and the masses, the NCAA keeps shouting about ‘student-athletes’, and the student athletes get room, board, ‘career development’, and local access to attractive ‘dates.’ Once in awhile a real student athlete shows up and we never hear the end of it!
rsmulcahy - August 9, 2010 at 12:42 pm
I don’t believe that this new metric will make much difference to anything important to the education of student-athletes but rburns needs to learn to not throw out the baby with the bath water. Sure there are contradictions and imperfections in the institution of college sports, name me a human institution that does not suffer from such imperfections. The scandals/incompetence of the federal government, the Catholic church, and the US banking system are all great examples of imperfect institutions that have far more impact on society than college sports. But the way some people rattle on, you would think the fate of western civilization depends on whether or not student-atheltes are getting a rigorous education. Read Speer’s “Beer and Circuses” if you want a more accurate look at the whole higher education enterprise and who is complicit in undermining it. Minus the student-athlete population, do you think all undergraduates on a D-I campus are potential Rhodes scholars? Get real. And exactly what are the mechanisms by which athletics injures higher education? Revenue sport athletes are a small subset of all student-athletes but, regardless, if these revenue students are graduating at higher rates than their non-athlete peers what is the problem? There is no problem except for people who have nothing better to do than act aghast at things of small consequence.And finally for rburns, what is your obsession with the length of time Rick Pitino needs to have sex? Are you impressed with his efficiency or disturbed he could not continue longer?
dos1071 - August 9, 2010 at 4:55 pm
during my master’s program I wrote a paper proposing that athletics and colleges be divorced from one another. Athletics programs do little to cultivate true student learning outcomes. This “new” program by the NCAA is one more method of playing “bait-and-switch”. The student will continue to lose to athletics. This is but another sad entry into the annals of higher education history.