Well, it’s we’re in the thick of March Madness (or if you’re a Vancouver Canucks fan “March Badness,” but that’s another story), and the folks at Inside Higher Ed have come up with a rather unique take on “The Big Dance,” asking “What if the tidal wave of frenzied ethnusiasm” for college hoops was directed at applauding the graduation rates of basketball players, rather than their tourney prowess?
The Inside Higher Ed brackets show how 65 teams in the NCAA tournament advance from the first round through the “Sweet Sixteen,” “Elite Eight,” and “Final Four,” down to a National Championship for hoops player graduation rates. Teams advance based on their NCAA Graduation Success Rate, as compiled by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida, which released its annual report on the academic performance of college sports teams on Sunday.
In this alternative universe the mighty Bucknell Bison prevail.
The institute found that 64 percent of the teams in the tournament graduated at least 50 percent of their basketball players according to the Graduation Success Rate, the NCAA’s newly conceived accounting measure, and 36 percent of the teams graduated at least 70 percent of their players. Only 25 percent of the teams graduated fewer than 40 percent of their players. (The Graduation Success Rate differs from the widely used federal rate by excluding from the calculation athletes who leave the institution in good academic standing before graduating, and including those who transfer into the institution and graduate. As a result, the rates tend to be about 10 percent higher than the federal rate on average.)
The institute highlighted racial disparity as the most glaring problem. Sixty-six percent of the teams graduated at least 70 percent of their white players, while only 33 percent did the same with black players. Twenty-five tournament teams have at least a 30 percentage point gap between the graduation rates of white and black basketball players.
The Final Four in the NCAA Graduation Success Rate Tournament includes:
Bucknell U Bison
Villanova U Wildcats
U of North Carolina at Wilmington Seahawks
U of Illinois Fighting Illini
Dowload your brackets here.
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For all of the noise made around graduation rates, does anyone really care? Remember, Myles Brand fired Bob Knight at Indiana when all but TWO of his players in 27 years at IU had graduated. The NCAA has as its bottom line dollars, not students. With sham conference tournaments taking players away from the classroom so that the NCAA and its conferences can make more money, the whole institution of college basketball is whoring itself at the alter of capitalist greed and excess. Perhaps players and coaches need a course in a marxist analysis of the NCAA.
Thanks Wayne, for the “bracketology lesson.”
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