STORRS, Conn. -- Jay Bilas is a smart man with a high-profile position as basketball analyst for ESPN and CBS Sports. He also is smart enough to know that no matter how much bully is in his pulpit, the NCAA is not going to knuckle under to one man's voice.
Even if it belongs to a Dookie.
If your position is that UConn basketball can blame itself for a horrible Academic Progress Rate that leaves it in position to be banned from the 2013 NCAA Tournament, you will get no argument here.
If your position is that the latest academic data must be used to determine eligibility for the NCAA Tournament, which ostensibly would put UConn back into 2013 March Madness, you will get no argument here, either.
The stance is not contradictory. The arguments are separate. So I want to be careful here in allowing Bilas to present his APR case on my turf. Set rules are set rules. Yet Bilas also makes a compelling case why eligibility issues should not be determined by a national governing body.
"If we have a minimum standard, everybody is going to find a way meet the standard," Bilas said Saturday when ESPN's "College GameDay" rolled into Gampel Pavilion. "It's going to be education that suffers. Graduation is not the only benchmark in education."
"We have 350 Division I institutions. No idiot on the planet would look at you and say all of them have the same mission statement, same standards, are as difficult or easy as one other. It's ludicrous to distinct that. Individual schools know how to educate their students. Let them do it. We don't tell them how to educate any other except for athletes."
Bilas has become the most respected television voice in college sports. You might think the NCAA would reach out to him to seek his input. You would think wrong.
"They don't care what I say," Bilas said. "They're going to do what they're going to do. That's fine. You're asking me what I think. I'm telling you."
"This has nothing to do with education. This is all political. It's about public perception. This APR number is absurd."
I don't know Bilas' politics and I don't want to know. In some ways this reminds me of federal vs. states' rights. Yet one of the beauties of sports debate is that it allows us to step away from the political cookie-cutter and argue common sense on its own merit.
It is no surprise to hear that Bilas, an attorney, doesn't believe in NCAA entrance eligibility requirements, either.
"I think each school can determine who gets a uniform and whether they are qualified to get in our not," Bilas said. "We don't do (otherwise) with legacies and exceptional students in other areas like music or drama."
"If you have a private institution where it's really difficult to get in, really difficult to excel, but graduating is easy: What are we going to do as opposed to a state institution with 40,000 students and they thin the herd (after admittance)? We need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges."
Some at UConn have pointed out that the school does not have the easy major, an emphasis of study where athletes gravitate at some schools. In the parlance, it's "clustering."
"Everybody will go into the same majors," Bilas said of increasing APR demands. "It won't serve the purposes of education. (The APR) is a PR thing, only for PR. I don't think it's worthwhile. ... People go, 'It's easy. Take away the postseason.' Well, schools aren't going to miss the number. They'll do whatever it takes to make it. I just don't think a kid flunking out means the system is in trouble."
Source: http://www.modbee.com/2012/02/25/2086039/espns-jay-bilas-faults-ncaa-on.html
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