Issue date: 3/25/04 Section: Sports

If your kids brought home the same lousy report cards that two-thirds of the 65 teams in the NCAA men's tournament did, they'd be grounded for months. Instead, they're all going to get new sneakers and fistfuls of cash.

Now you know why some of the people who watch college sports are always mad in March. It has nothing to do with basketball and everything to do - stop us if you've heard this before - with money. Those same people figure that if CBS is paying $6 billion over 11 years to the NCAA, the schools sharing that loot should be graduating most of the kids that play for them.

Talk about a radical idea - if it ever catches on, many in the current crop of student-athletes would become as extinct as dodos. But pretend, for the moment, anyway, that the watchdogs were keeping score.

First the good news: Stanford would score 100, Lehigh 90, Dayton 82 and Kansas 73. Five other schools, including those perennial bookworms at Duke and Vanderbilt, would register in
the 60s.

Now the bad: Four other so-called institutions of higher learning in the field would have a big, fat zero alongside their names. That's even harder to accomplish than it sounds.

The marking period in the NCAA's latest graduation rate report covered scholarship athletes who entered school between 1993-96 and allowed each six years to graduate. With that much time, you'd think at least one phys ed major in one of those places would have stumbled through the degree maze by sheer luck. Then again, maybe there aren't as many of Jim Harrick Jr.'s exams in circulation as we thought.

In any case, those four schools weren't identified in the latest report, because along with a dozen others, they took advantage of a loophole created by new federal privacy rules and avoided publicly reporting any graduation rates at all. No matter. There is enough disgrace to go around.

Another 40 schools that made the tournament field failed to graduate even half their kids, a number that trails the national average by a few percentage points. Ditto for at least four teams in the Sweet 16 (and maybe more, since only 11 of the 16 schools still playing published their graduation rates).

Continued...

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