Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 15, 1990 TAG: 9005150243
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Brill
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, D.C. LENGTH: Medium
Want to sell a dinosaur? Call your football coach.
Cynicism aside, I sometimes wonder if coaches truly understand the problems that persist in intercollegiate athletics today.
Not all of them, obviously, but too many. Include among them some giants of the football fraternity, some of whom met Monday with the Knight Commission.
Predictably, the coaches don't want to cut staff sizes. Some of them - five of seven in Monday's group - want freshmen ineligibility, but only if it is tied in with an increase in scholarship numbers.
From 25 grants annually and 95 total to 35 and 110, said Penn State's Joe Paterno, who doesn't favor that plan personally.
Don't fret, Joe. It won't happen. College sports is in a reform and cost-cutting mode.
The coaches profess to be worried about the NFL, about graduation rates, and, generally, just what is expected of them.
Let's be fair. Coaches are now being held accountable for being role models, for drug education and graduating their players.
And, they still are expected to win, although when the won-lost record is tabulated against Division I foes, it will come out 50-50.
"We have to do these things, yet fill the stadium and win on Saturday," said Tom Osborne, Nebraska's coach. "It's hard to fit all that together. It's difficult to balance. [Coaches] need a clear indication of what you expect of us."
No question. Score one for Osborne, the top winning coach in the land now that the sport is rid of Barry Switzer.
But Osborne flunked in another key debate.
"We considerably underestimate the academic performance of athletes," Osborne insisted.
Then he read from a national survey that showed only 32 percent of college students get a degree.
Big-time football and basketball schools don't look bad against those numbers, Osborne said.
That is an unfortunate cop-out, one too often utilized by Osborne's coaching associates.
Forget about those figures. Grant-in-aid athletes - with their education paid for, with academic support systems including tutoring available - should graduate at a better rate than the overall student body.
This is especially true when the school is state-supported, possibly with an open admission policy.
Knight Commission member Jane Pfeiffer pointed out that half of college freshmen depart before the midway point of their sophomore year, most often for financial reasons.
That isn't the excuse for most athletes.
A survey taken in the Big Eight Conference showed 33 percent of football players and 23 percent of basketball players graduated. Those numbers alarm Creed Black, president of the Knight Commission and former editor of the Lexington, Ky., paper that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Kentucky's numerous athletic woes.
Unhappily, Osborne attempted to defend the numbers by saying they weren't that far off from national figures.
That should have evoked a wince from North Carolina State coach Dick Sheridan, whose own football-graduation record has been smudged by the ongoing tribulations of former basketball coach Jim Valvano.
Sheridan said the coaches agreed with a 20-hour weekly time limit for athletes to devote to their sport in season and eight hours out of season, although noting, "Just because you save an hour or two, that doesn't mean they're going to the library."
But, Dick, those that wanted to, could.
Penn State's Paterno wants to eliminate all requirements for admission but permit only three years of eligibility. Athletes couldn't play until they maintained a 2.0 grade-point average.
To which Tom McMillen, the Rhodes Scholar out of Maryland and now a Congressman, responded, "What if there was a kid in high school with a 2.0 [grade-point average] and 500 on the college boards, but he was the greatest football player you've ever seen? What would you do?"
McMillen knows. That player would be recruited. If not by Penn State, by somebody. And at too many schools, he'd maintain the 2.0 to stay eligible.
Wake Forest President Tom Hearn, considered something of a maverick in the athletic world, scorns the thought that freshmen shouldn't be allowed to play simply because they're freshmen.
Obviously, it would have been ludicrous to sideline McMillen, who besides being 6-foot-11 was an "A" student.
As for football, Hearn snorted, "You've already got freshman ineligibility. It's called redshirting. They don't play and they ain't doing any better in school."
The biggest argument for ineligibility is to allow for academic transition, yet no studies have indicated a shred of evidence that players who don't play do better school work than those who do.
But let's not place all the blame on the coaches.
"If anybody's doing anything wrong, it's the presidents," Chase Peterson said. "Either through inaction, fatigue, or lack of courage . . . "
Peterson should know. He is the president at Utah.
by CNB