Athletics

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED

The final college football Bowl Championship Series rankings were announced on Sunday: Alabama and Louisiana State University (LSU) will go head-to-head in this year’s National Championship game come January.

No doubt, watching Alabama try to beat the undefeated LSU team for the second time this season in an SEC vs. SEC match-up has the potential to be great football. The Bowl Championship Series, college football’s ranking system that matches up top Division I teams for a series of annual post-season bowl games, is perennially disliked for the opaque formula it uses to rank which teams are best but loved for the many, high-intensity football games it has matched up over the years.

Still, we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the sport’s dark side. In the classroom, Division I college football teams often fall short. The fact that a player’s college football career is valued more than his academic career is often accepted as the status quo in Division I college football. But these players put in a lot of work for their teams and are compensated solely with college scholarships—and how much is that scholarship worth if a student athlete doesn’t graduate? Though some will go on to have lucrative pro football careers, most won’t, and the players who aren’t bound for NFL glory would benefit from having college degrees to fall back on.

With these issues in mind, policy researchers at the New America Foundation’s Higher Ed Watch blog have for several years used a formula to rival the Bowl Championship Series’s rankings. The Academic BCS measures how well a team supports the “student” side of its student athletes.

Unlike the BCS’s controversial ranking formula, the Academic BCS transparently compares data on team graduation rates and academic progress rates (an NCAA measure of academic success) to the performance of other teams, as well as to regular students at BCS colleges. The results are a look at how football schools would stack up if academics decided a team’s BCS ranking.

The 2011 Academic Bowl Championship Series Rankings

If academics were central to the Bowl Championship Series, top-ranked LSU would fall to 13^th in the rankings. The biggest factor dragging down LSU’s performance is the fact that black players at LSU are a whopping 32 percentage points less likely to graduate from college in 6 years or fewer than their white teammates.

The first-place academic team in the BCS rankings is Penn State. 80 percent of Penn State football players who enroll as freshmen currently graduate from college in 6 years or fewer, a respectable grad rate for any sports team or even a university at large. (If you exclude students who transfer or leave the college to play professionally from the dropout rate, 87 percent of Penn players graduate in 6 years or fewer.)

Additionally, there is no black-white graduation rate gap among players on the university’s football team. It’s disappointing to say that is very rare for Division I football. Stanford, example, does an extremely good job of graduating its football players overall and was ranked #1 in last year’s Academic BCS, but the school fell to fourth this year namely because Stanford has a 21 percent gap between the black and white graduation rates for its players.

In the Bowl Championship Series rankings, Alabama barely edged out Oklahoma State for the second place seat this year, causing a stir around whether the ranking was conducted fairly. Unfortunately for Oklahoma State, Alabama triumphs in both the BCS and its academic counterpart: Alabama ranked fifth in our academic ranking and second in the regular BCS ranking, making Alabama and Stanford the only two teams to place in the top 5 for both football and academics. Oklahoma State fared worse, coming in third in the BCS and 15^th in the academic rankings.

Methodology

Four different calculations are used in the Academic BCS: the football team’s graduation rate relative to the school overall; the difference between black and white graduation rates on the team; the difference between black and white graduation rates at the school overall; and the difference between the graduation rates of black players on the football team and the school’s overall black student population.

We use the standard 4-class average graduation rate in our BCS rankings. This rate does not take into account students that transfer out of a college or leave to play professionally. Using this rate allows us to best compare a football team’s graduation rate to the overall graduation rate of students at that college.

Also important is the pool that our BCS ranking draws from. We use the top 25 teams in the Bowl Championship Series’s final standings when we make our rankings. Thus, the teams in the Academic BCS have displayed prominence on the field and, in the case of the top-ranked teams, in the classroom. A list of this year’s BCS rankings and the rankings from previous years is available here. A more detailed explanation of our formula is available here.

The NCAA has its own measure of academic success, the academic progress rate, which measures whether a team is moving its players towards graduation. With the APR, teams get points for eligibility (having players who have good enough grades to play sports) and for retention (having players who don’t drop out of college). Higher Ed Watch takes the APR into account in our formula, but assigns less weight to it than it does for other measures that we believe are more important.

This year's Academic BCS rankings were published yesterday by TIME.com.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament this year by telling the media that schools should only qualify for post-season play if they are on track to graduate at least 40 percent of their players.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament earlier this month with an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that schools should only qualify for post-season play if they are on track to graduate at least 40 percent of their players.

The argument by Duncan, who is a basketball player and fan himself, has been made by many critics, including the Knight Commission for Intercollegiate Athletics, which proposed restricting participation to only those programs that graduated more than half of their players. And rightfully so: men’s college basketball does a poor job of graduating its players, with 10 of the original 68 teams in the tournament not meeting the “50 percent” benchmark this year. This leaves players who don’t go professional -- the vast majority of them -- without the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the real world. Many sportswriters and fans, on the other hand, think that Duncan’s viewpoint is out of touch --and that critics of NCAA basketball and football need to come to grips with the fact that, for many athletes who play for hugely popular athletics programs, the sport is simply more important than the degree.

At Higher Ed Watch, we have a different problem with Duncan’s suggestion: we don’t think he goes far enough. If teams were forced to have to meet a graduation rate requirement in order to compete in the tournament, problems with cheating and academic dishonesty among players and schools would be even more rampant than they are today while the immense pressure for the players to succeed on the court would be as strong as ever. Considering the lax oversight the NCAA provides, this would not be an adequate solution for mending what is broken in Division 1 basketball.

To really get players on track to graduate, the NCAA should take a tip from its old playbook: freshmen ineligibility. We believe that the NCAA should make all Division 1 football and men’s basketball players ineligible to play during their freshmen year so they have time to adjust and ground themselves academically during the time they need it most. Then, student athletes would at least have a handle on academics before trying to balance their dual roles.

Two undefeated college football teams, Auburn University and the University of Oregon, will go head-to-head in the upcoming BCS National Championship game. The game will be one of five high-profile match-ups in the Bowl Championship Series early next month.

Undoubtedly, the student athletes playing for Auburn and Oregon are proud to be representing their schools in the championship game. But as Higher Ed Watch has noted in the past, there are aspects of college football that no one should be proud of -- from the booming commercialization of college sports, to the unsavory role of agents and runners in recruiting, to the academic struggles of student athletes that are too often overlooked in favor of a successful season.

With these issues in mind, Higher Ed Watch presents the Fourth Annual Academic Bowl Championship Series: a look at how football schools would stack up if academic success determined a team’s Bowl Championship Series standing. Unlike the BCS’s mysterious and controversial ranking formula, we use the federal graduation rates and academic progress rates (APRs) of teams to rank which college football programs are keeping academics as a priority for their players.

"I will never forget the first time I paid a player," begins former sports agent Josh Luchs in his cover story for the October 18^th issue of Sports Illustrated. Luchs goes on to detail how he doled out thousands of dollars in cash and gifts to popular Division I athletes, with hopes that these players would eventually sign with him as an agent."There are moments you will always remember, like your first kiss or your first home run or the day you met your wife,” he says. “For me, the first time I broke an NCAA rule to try to land a client is just as indelible."

The story is turning heads: It's rare to hear anyone speak so openly about the sordid role agents can play in college sports, and Luchs goes so far as to name around 30 former college football players who violated NCAA rules by taking money and/or gifts from NFL agents.

Luch’s story arrives in the wake of the NCAA barring three University of North Carolina football players from the rest of the season for taking benefits from agents. ESPN reported that one of the players, defensive end Robert Quinn, accepted “two black diamond watches, a pair of matching earrings and travel accommodations to Miami.” As more stories like Luchs’s and Quinn’s surface, they suggest that these dealings between agents and players constitute a shady status quo among popular Division I athletes.

By Ben Miller and Lindsey Luebchow

College football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is in hot water again this year with five undefeated teams and still no playoff system to determine the national champion. It’s unsatisfying to fans—and apparently to members of Congress and the White House too—when a complicated series of computer rankings, coaches’ polls, and other metrics magically reward two squads. But there’s a much more unsettling story swept under the rug during these debates: the poor academic performance and embarrassing graduation rates of most of the country’s top 25 football schools.

It is with those concerns in mind that Higher Ed Watch has analyzed, for the third year in a row, the federal graduation statistics and Academic Progress Rates of the top gridiron teams. The blog’s goal is to find those teams that have players delivering both on the field and in the classroom—and those that leave too many of their players without a degree and with few career prospects.

So who would be contending for the crystal trophy in Pasadena, Calif., if the match-up was determined by academic performance? They may not be playing for the title, but Penn State and Stanford are the class of the BCS, according to Higher Ed Watch’s rankings of the top 25 college football teams.

With two-time champion Boston College dropping out of the rankings this year, Penn State’s Nittany Lions moved up from sharing the number two spot in last year’s ranking to take over the top spot. The Stanford Cardinal, which is making its Academic BCS debut thanks to an 8-4 season, takes the second spot as the only other squad to receive more than 100 points under Higher Ed Watch's calculation. These two teams are followed by Cincinnati (number four last year) and Boise State (eighth).

Meanwhile, this year’s top football contenders wouldn’t even come close to competing. In fact, the University of Texas, which is scheduled to face the University of Alabama in the title game, again comes in dead last in the rankings. The Longhorns have occupied the bottom rung now for the past two years, and only an appearance by the University of Hawaii in 2007 has kept them from the three-peat. Other poor performers are the University of Arizona, the University of Oregon, and Oregon State University.

As for the current defending champion University of Florida Gators, they will not be competing for the BCS title this year, but they can take some solace from the fact that their score increased 10 points in the rankings, moving them from 21st to 20th in the poll.

Of the Sweet Sixteen teams, only Villanova and Purdue universities bested MSU in graduation rates of its basketball players, according to the New America Foundation think tank. "That's a point of pride. And that pride is easily transmitted to the rest ...

by Lindsey Luebchow

There haven't been many upsets in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you'll find that most of the top teams wouldn't even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.

Higher Ed Watch's third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn't on anyone's radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue's 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova's 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.

 

Lindsey Luebchow of the New America Foundation asks that question here. She concludes that if academics were factored into big-college football, ...

Now here's a little salt for those wounds: Both the Noles and the Gators made Higher Ed Watch's top 25 list of teams based on academic achievement, ...