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 Derrick
Z. Jackson, Boston Globe columnist and indefatigable
crusader against the sham that is "amateur" collegiate sports in this
country, especially football and basketball. The Dowbrigade has
also written about the cruel dream of teen transcendence into professional
sports, an American version of Ossama’s 47 virgins waiting in paradise,
which has shunted an entire generation of American minority youth onto
a dead-end sidetrack of asphalt and hardwood.
Jackson hits hard again in a web-only
column posted to the Globe
web site yesterday, and in a follow-up
article published in the print
edition today:
March Madness ought to be canceled with the scandal that is in the computer
banks of the NCAA’s 2003 Graduation Rates Report. The report covers whether
scholarship athletes who entered school in the falls of 1993, 1994, 1995,
or 1996 graduated within six years. The report is the best long-term
way to see whether a university is providing an education to its athletes
or pimping them in an era where CBS is paying the NCAA $6 billion over
11 years to televise men’s games and where an additional $3.5 billion
will be wagered illegally on this year’s tournament alone, according
to the Wall Street Journal.
Last year, 13 men’s schools had a 0% graduation rate for black men.
The average black male graduation rate for the 65-team field was 35
percent.
With the liberation provided by the new privacy rules, only one university
in this year’s field published a black male rate under 38 percent.
That was Eastern Washington, where the rate was zero.
Of the 65 teams in the men’s tournament, 49 published graduation statistics.
Of those 49 schools, the graduation average was 49.7 percent, higher
than the overall NCAA average of 42 percent.
The 37 schools that did not publish 2003 black graduation rates had a
2002 black average of 19.7 percent.
The Knight Commission on college sports proposed that schools that
do not graduate 50 percent of their players should be banned from tournaments
and bowl games. On that basis, you would wipe out more than half of
the
NCAA men’s tournament field.
You get the idea. This is a scam completely against the spirit
of sports and the avowed principles of equality this country was
founded on. What happens to all of those talented players who spend most
of their youth honing their skills, get used for a few years by some
major college program, and then get dumped back on the street with broken
bodies without a whiff or a hope of a professional career and without
so much as a diploma or any marketable skills? It is starting to make
sense now to see who sponsors all of the High School coronations and
All-American lists – McDonalds is recruiting its next generation of highly
skilled counter help.
Web-only column
Print followup article
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