Last week’s release of the N-C-Double-A “Academic Progress Report” turned out to be bad news for K-State and Kansas.
It’s the subject for tonight’s “On the Mark”. Kansas lost two football scholarships, K-State lost a basketball scholarship, and both institutions get to suffer from the bad publicity that goes along with being labeled as an underachiever. Of course, they have plenty of company.
The N-C-Double-A hit 200 teams with scholarship reductions and other sanctions. And somehow, at the end of the day, they still managed to pat themselves on the backside, indicating that progress had been made at its member institutions. The N-C-Double-A says it spent years formulating a system that would provide a balanced grade card to access the academic side of athletic programs. In basic terms, it requires that 60 percent of the team graduate.
That’s seems easy enough, but only two questions are really being asked. Are your athletes eligible? And, are your athletes in school? Not only did K-State and K-U have athletes who departed, but those athletes left in poor academic standing… which turned out to be strike one and two. Who would blame either athletic program, in the future, if they steered, so-called, “athletes at risk” toward the path of least resistance. What the N-C-Double-A doesn’t chart is whether their ball players are taking on an academic load which will provide something of value after graduation day.
If they did, then that would be academic progress worth reporting. That’s “On the Mark”.