Each year at around this same time Ohio State football fans begin to ponder what the Buckeyes chances are of making it to a New Year’s Day bowl game. Anticipation grows with every Saturday and loyalists watch the polls like starving hawks searching for prey.
Soon, however, fans may see their focus switching from the score card to the report card. With this summer’s release of the Knight Foundation Commission’s recommendations on the sad state of college athletics, the bowl games and the playoff berths won’t just be decided on the fields and gyms, but at a different area on campus – the classrooms.
The KFC is not affiliated with the NCAA but is an organization composed of former and current university presidents and members of the private sector who have interests in college athletics.
One of the commission’s most laudable recommendations is that by 2007, teams that graduate less than 50 percent of their athletes will be ineligible for post-season play. Sounds great, right? This doesn’t seem like a huge feat to accomplish. Fifty percent doesn’t seem too much to ask out of our athletes, does it?
Teams have their tutors and their priority scheduling. They should at least be able to graduate half their athletes. Well, OSU’s favorite team to watch (no, not our national champion synchronized swimming team) is graduating its student athletes at a pathetic 17 percent rate. A rate that OSU President William “Brit” Kirwan has called “totally embarrassing.”
It is far worse than embarrassing, it is nauseating. It should make administrators faculty, students and parents all want to toss their cookies. Like it or not, OSU is known in general circles for sports, particularily football, and until Kirwan’s all-encompassing Academic Plan stretches it wings, things will remain as such. To have our reputation as a jock school furthered by our lackluster graduation rates will do this university irreparable damage. President Kirwan will, if he bolsters the graduation rates of OSU athletes and in the process makes it a priority for other schools to do the same, do more for this university’s reputation then any ranking in U.S. World News & Report. OSU’s head honcho actually has a chance for greatness.
Kirwan is head of the board that will decide just how far these recommendations get and he has boldly stated that he will not consider easier conditions to allow an easier standard for OSU. If Kirwan sticks to his word we may just see some positive changes with regard to academics becoming important to OSU’s athletics department.
Before Buckeye fans panic at this prospect, everyone should realize there is no way OSU is going to let its marquee football and basketball teams go into a season with no chance of playing for a championship. Instead, these players will be pushed to achieve academically and brains may become equal to brawn in off-season recruiting.
The commission tackled everything from lowering coaches salaries to banning uniform logos, but surely the most important issue is graduation rates. A college football team that wins a national championship and only graduates 17 percent of its players is not a college team, it is a training camp or a baby-sitting service.
College sports are big money, especially at OSU, and many people are profiting off what these student athletes are doing. Championships bring in big bucks, they make alumni, sponsors and advertisers happy. There is nothing wrong with marketing the teams.
But who’s getting paid? The coaches, the athletics directors and the advertisers are doing just fine, but what about the athletes? Maybe a few go pro, but what’s left for the rest of them? Universities owe these student athletes something. They made promises to them about their bright futures to bring them here, parents were told that the best interests of their children would be the top priority. Were academic interests not included?
