Washington ? The NCAA did its best to dance around the huge elephant in the room when addressing the unimpressive graduation rates among college baseball players.
“There are a lot of games,” Southern Methodist University President Gerald Turner said, “a lot of games.”
Turner is co-chairman of the reform-minded Knight Commission, which gave special attention to baseball’s problems at its regular meeting Monday. It voted to support the changes announced recently by the NCAA.
The reforms are specifically aimed at the sport, and only one deals at all with the fact that athletes are playing 56-game schedules while trying to keep up with class work during the spring semester.
Baseball, football and men’s basketball have consistently compiled the worst scores in the Academic Progress Report, the scorecard for measuring graduation rates adopted a few years ago by the NCAA. Next year, when the APR will have been around long enough for the full results to count, as many as 99 baseball teams, 142 basketball teams and 93 football could face penalties, according to current projections.
“The argument’s always been that in that particular range, it doesn’t affect their academic performance,” Turner said. “But something is.”
Baseball was getting to be such a concern that some within the NCAA considered cutting back the number of games to somewhere in the 40s. Instead, a panel came up with several rule changes that were implemented by the NCAA’s board of directors last month:
¢ Only 27 players can receive at least partial scholarships, and no one can receive less than one-third of a full scholarship.
¢ Transfers will have to sit out one year before regaining their eligibility – like football and basketball players do.
¢ Athletes will have to establish academic eligibility in the fall, since their class loads are so lean in the spring and summer.
l Teams that have an APR score below 900 could face a 10 percent reduction in the number of games played and practices allowed.
The changes take effect in August 2008.
Big 12 Commissioner Kevin Weiberg, who worked on the NCAA baseball panel, told the Knight Commission that the rules were meant in part to address a “free agent mentality” that has developed in the college ranks. Weiberg said that baseball has twice as many transfers as football, and that transfers don’t perform as well academically.
A groundswell of coaches, however, have opposed the rules – particularly the scholarship limits – and hope that at least some of them will be overridden by the full NCAA membership.
“We were well aware they would be controversial,” Weiberg said.
Weiberg said the NCAA panel decided not to recommend reducing the number of games because the statistics showed it might not make a difference.
“We saw some low-APR teams that played a lot of games, but we also saw some high-APR teams that played a lot of games,” Weiberg said. “There wasn’t a pure one-to-one correlation between games played and the APR, so we really hung our hat on that.
“Having said that, there was some direct evidence of baseball players saying they just don’t have enough time, whether they’re traveling or practicing or playing.”
If the changes lead to more graduating baseball players, the number of games will probably remain where it is for now. However, the subject is very much up for discussion if the graduation rates don’t improve.
“They think they’ve addressed just about everything else,” Turner said. “So if that doesn’t show up, I think you can see the numbers of games will start being addressed again.”
