Hungry Huskies Win, NCAA Loses

Seconds after leading his school to its 4^th NCAA tournament victory in 15 years, Shabazz Napier grabbed the microphone and addressed 80,000 people in AT&T Stadium:

“Ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at the hungry Huskies! This is what happens when you ban us! Last year, two years, we worked so hard for it. Two years—“

At that point CBS acted swiftly to hide what they deemed to be Napier's criticism of the NCAA from their televised broadcast. CBS company-man/anchorman Jim Nantz grabbed the microphone from Napier to tell him he had been named Tournament MVP, and CBS cut to a commercial break. 

CBS must have worried giving Napier a chance to air his school’s grievances might jeopardize the network’s 11 year-$10.8 billion broadcasting contract with the NCAA. 

This morning, numerous reports have labeled Napier’s 3 sentences “controversial,” but was it as controversial as the academic ban Napier referred to?

In 2012, the NCAA handed UConn a 1-year postseason ban for failing to meet academic standards. What was once a 1-or-2 scholarship penalty swiftly turned into a much more serious punishment.

The NCAA changed the rules (or rather, the punishment for breaking the rules) mid-game, and UConn’s paid the price for what amounted to a retroactive punishment for conduct that never had been judged so harshly. UConn players who had done everything right were punished harshly for the actions of a few players who came and left the program before they ever arrived.

Why is this the first time you've heard about the NCAA's retroactive punishment?

CBS is a major partner with Turner Broadcasting in the NCAA Tournament. Turner controls Sports Illustrated and CNNSI.com. As mentioned earlier, CBS/Turner’s exclusive broadcasting contract cost nearly $11 billion and will last until 2025.

ESPN also has a $500 million broadcasting contract for regular season and NIT basketball games that also lasts until 2025. 

Both the CBS and ESPN deals were signed in 2011. A year before the rule change.

The unfairness of UConn’s postseason ban was largely swept under the rug because the two major American sports “journalism” outlets had a major stake in protecting and promoting the best interests of the NCAA.

How exactly did the NCAA change the punishment on UConn?

The NCAA uses an Academic Performance Rate (APR) to evaluate whether a specific program complies with academic standards. The rate is fairly simple to explain. Each school must keep over 92.5% their scholarship players academically eligible over a 2-year period, and 90% over a 4-year period.

A player can leave a school early to play professionally, but must be in good academic standing at the time of dropping out in order to help the program’s APR and not hurt it.

First of all, the system in itself slants against basketball and for football. NCAA basketball players must be enrolled in both the fall and spring semesters in order to participate. NCAA football players only must be enrolled in the fall. Basketball players have to juggle academic and athletic commitments over two semesters, not just one.

In addition, football players can drop out before the spring semester in order to prepare for the NFL draft and their programs’ don’t feel nearly the same consequences as basketball players. Basketball players are forced to decide whether to complete a spring semester at a school they plan to leave or improve their skills in the gym to impress their future employer.

At the end of the day, isn't college supposed to be about developing students into professionals? 

The NBA draft is nothing more than a job offer to a college student. Should a school’s computer science department be penalized if its best students drop out to take jobs at Google? If an NBA team wants to give a college athlete a professional contract, why should the NCAA punish the program that helped that athlete develop into a professional?

Was the NCAA trying to act in its athletes’ best interests with this? Or were they maintaining the appearance of academia and rebuilding their case that basketball players are “student-athletes,” and not employees?

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. Back to the injustices of the APR as it applies to college basketball in general, and UConn in particular.

The lower numbers of scholarships allowed on a college basketball team mean one or two bad students are very hard to recover from. Football teams are allowed 85 scholarship players. Basketball teams are allowed 13.  

A football team can have 13  academically-ineligible athletes (equivalent to an entire basketball roster) and have the same rate as a basketball team with 2 guys out.

This makes it extremely difficult for basketball programs to recover from a couple players who decided not to take their academic commitments seriously.  APR is measured over 2 and 4 year increments, which is not enough time for a program with a bad academic year to recover.

For example, for the sake of easy math, let’s say men’s basketball had the same scholarship limit as women’s basketball—15. 

One year X team had 15 scholarship players. 11 finished the year in good academic standing. Another left school early to go to the NBA but took his May finals and left in good academic standing. 

2 are academically ineligible but still in school, trying to get their grades up. 1 more left school without taking his finals in pursuit of the NBA. The program gets credit for 12 of the 15 players and scores an academic progress rate of 80%.

That rate is multiplied by 1,000 to get the 3-digit score the NCAA uses to evaluate academic progress. So in the above example, X team would have an APR of 800.

Even if X team keeps all of its players in good academic standing the next year, the two year rate would still be 27/30 or 90%, bringing their score up to just 900.

NCAA guidelines set the minimum 2-year APR at 925 and 4-year minimum at 900. But before 2012, failure to comply with these guidelines simply meant programs would lose one or two scholarships until the APR rose to an acceptable rate.  The penalty changed drastically in 2012, but the NCAA still used academic numbers from 2009, 2010, and 2011 (when the punishment was far less severe) to get a 2012 APR score.

UConn had a bad academic season in 2009/10. The Huskies' APR was 826. In 2010/11, however, the Huskies excelled in both the classroom and on the court, winning the national championship and scoring an APR of 978.

Despite this significant improvement, UConn’s 2-year APR was just 902, 23 points below the NCAA’s minimum. The NCAA suspended UConn from 2012/13 postseason play as punishment.

Shabazz Napier's freshman year began in 2010. No player on the current UConn team played with the "bad apples" of 2009. And when he signed to play for UConn, the punishment for such a low APR was not nearly as severe. He and his teammates had every right to feel hard-done-by. 

Napier's team was unfairly punished. And he stuck with UConn through the bad times. A champion in his freshman year, perhaps no single player faced more adversity during his time in school. No player has ever faced a bigger temptation to leave a school behind and go pro. But Napier stuck through it all. And he brought his team back to the top on his way out the door.

Frankly, I wish Napier had been given more time to speak. I wanted to hear everything he had to say.