MrBug708
02-14-2005, 01:47 PM
Losing nine athletes to academic issues in recent days has been a "wake-up call" for the University of Texas, the school's athletic director said Friday.
The men's basketball team has lost its leading scorer and rebounder, the baseball team is without its top pitcher, and the football team will practice this spring without its heir apparent at running back — all sidelined by poor grades or inadequate course credits.
"It's bad that kids got hurt, but it's a wake-up call for everybody," Men's Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds said. "It's a defining moment for everybody."
But Dodds and Women's Athletic Director Chris Plonsky could not point to a single reason or trend for the rash of athletes being declared ineligible this semester.
"There's a story with each one," Dodds said, but privacy laws prevent him from telling those stories.
Rather, they point to more stringent National Collegiate Athletic Association rules and the overall academic climate at UT that make it a challenge to keep the "student" in "student-athlete" — even at a university that spends $1.6 million a year on academic assistance for its athletes.
Athletes must meet eligibility standards of both the university and the NCAA.
NCAA standards were toughened in 2003 to require athletes to have completed 40 percent of credits toward a degree by the end of their second year of school, 60 percent after the third year and 80 percent after the fourth. Previously, those percentages were 25-50-75.
The new 40 percent threshold for sophomores has proved to the biggest obstacle, the UT officials said.
"That absolutely will impact our world because they're asking the youngster to have 40 percent of their degree credits done after their second year, which no other student on campus has that requirement," Dodds said.
At the same time, the NCAA lowered its admission standards, adopting a sliding scale for SAT scores for athletes. An athlete with a high school grade-point average of 3.55 or higher, for instance, could just sign his name on the SAT, get the minimum 400 score and still qualify for admission under the NCAA guidelines.
"You don't have to be the student you used to be to get into an institution," Dodds said. "They've kind of built a trap for us to get into."
That trap snapped shut several times this semester, beginning with the news that star basketball player P.J. Tucker would not play once the spring semester began because he had not passed the necessary six hours in the fall; he remains enrolled this spring.
Then, baseball pitcher Sam LeCure was dismissed from the university because his grade-point average fell below 2.0; LeCure made an unsuccessful appeal to a federal judge to try to stay in school, citing a learning disability caused by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
This week, the football team announced that two starters and one backup would miss spring drills because of unspecified academic issues.
Those failures occurred despite a system set up to help athletes make the grade at UT. Dodds said UT spends as much per athlete on academic support as any university in the country, including $130,000 a year for upgrading computers and other equipment.
In the wake of the recent problems, Dodds and Plonsky said they are looking into changes in the academic support system. Among the plans is to make Assistant Athletic Director Brian Davis responsible only for the football team, not all nine men's programs that he currently oversees.
Including Davis, UT athletics employs four full-time counselors, an administrative assistant and a life skills/career counselor shared with the women's teams. In addition, UT uses approximately 60 tutors and mentors who work four to 20 hours per week, and the department's compliance office, which makes sure the university stays in step with NCAA rules, also spends some of its time on academics.
In all, about 20 employees are in some way devoted to academics, school officials said.
At least 10 hours of study hall a week is required for all first-year athletes, Davis said. Study hall is also mandatory for upperclassmen deemed to have grade problems or special needs. Class attendance is also checked.
Dodds said that the department tries to give athletes as much support as possible the first two years in the hope they can then be mainstreamed.
"Then they can walk on their own; they can run on their own; they can fly on their own," Dodds said.
In addition to meeting NCAA standards, athletes must meet the same criteria for all students at UT. Students who've taken 15 to 44 credit hours, for example, are placed on academic probation if their GPA falls below 2.0 and are dismissed if it falls below 1.7.
Dodds blames some of the athletes' problems on an increasingly tougher academic environment at UT, particularly in the past five years.
"You can't say, 'OK, let's put everybody over here.' There's no 'over here' to put them. They go out there, they're in diverse curriculums, and they meet the real world head on. Plus, they've got a full-time job in athletics. Their jobs are hard."
More sobering news could arrive when the NCAA sends out its first-ever report cards as soon as next week.
Though UT officials have expressed confidence they'll fare well there, the football program has had some of the worst graduation rates among all Division I-A programs in the past two years.
The NCAA's most recent graduation report showed that only 27 percent of Longhorn football players who were freshmen in 1997-98 had graduated by 2004, the worst rate in the Big 12 Conference and third-worst among 117 NCAA major football programs. By comparison, the graduation rate for all UT students in that class was 71 percent; the rate for all athletes was 52 percent.
To improve his team's rates, football coach Mack Brown says he now strongly factors academics into the recruiting process.
"We have to look at who can pass," Brown said. "Academics are something we've always been concerned about, but (recruiting) continually is getting tougher because of the school."
In the past, poor graduation rates led to bad publicity for a school but no real penalties. That's about to change.
Last month at a convention near Dallas, the NCAA adopted an Academic Performance Program aimed at increasing graduation rates. Schools will now receive report cards for individual sports that measure their short-term academic progress rate and their long-term graduation success rate.
first set of reports, to be made public by the NCAA late this month, will allow universities to see how they stack up. In coming years, penalties will accompany poor performance. A football team, for example, could lose as many as nine scholarships if its scores are bad enough, and chronic offenders could be banned from postseason tournaments and bowl games or even lose their NCAA membership.
UT officials think they're fine by the new standards, but some areas remain gray.
"We're not sure where everyone else is," Dodds said. "We don't know whether we're good, bad or indifferent."
It's academic for Texas athletes
Longhorns who are out this semester for academic reasons:
MEN'S BASKETBALL
P.J. Tucker, sophomore forward
Tucker was the team's leading scorer and rebounder when he was declared ineligible. Texas has lost four of five games since then.
FOOTBALL
Selvin Young, junior running back
Larry Dibbles, junior defensive tackle
Erick Jackson, freshman cornerback
All three will miss spring practice but are expected to return next season. Young's absence may be the most crucial: He missed almost all of the 2004 season with a broken ankle but is favored to be the starting tailback next season.
BASEBALL
Hunter Harris, senior outfielder
Sam LeCure, junior pitcher
LeCure, who was dismissed from school, was expected to have been the team's top starting pitcher. He unsuccessfully asked a federal judge to intervene, claiming that the university did not give him suitable accommodations for a learning disability. Three other baseball players — sophomore Nick Peoples, sophomore transfer Thomas Incaviglia and freshman Preston Clark — have not played because of academic issues, but their status for the rest of the spring is uncertain. 'They're processing some things academically, and that's all I can say,' Coach Augie Garrido said.
-------------------------------------
Mack, dont you hate it when school gets in the way of football? I do wonder how hard Texas will actually get hit with penalties? Probably not so much, but hopefully this will let other schools know that you do need to pay attention academics as well as sports
The men's basketball team has lost its leading scorer and rebounder, the baseball team is without its top pitcher, and the football team will practice this spring without its heir apparent at running back — all sidelined by poor grades or inadequate course credits.
"It's bad that kids got hurt, but it's a wake-up call for everybody," Men's Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds said. "It's a defining moment for everybody."
But Dodds and Women's Athletic Director Chris Plonsky could not point to a single reason or trend for the rash of athletes being declared ineligible this semester.
"There's a story with each one," Dodds said, but privacy laws prevent him from telling those stories.
Rather, they point to more stringent National Collegiate Athletic Association rules and the overall academic climate at UT that make it a challenge to keep the "student" in "student-athlete" — even at a university that spends $1.6 million a year on academic assistance for its athletes.
Athletes must meet eligibility standards of both the university and the NCAA.
NCAA standards were toughened in 2003 to require athletes to have completed 40 percent of credits toward a degree by the end of their second year of school, 60 percent after the third year and 80 percent after the fourth. Previously, those percentages were 25-50-75.
The new 40 percent threshold for sophomores has proved to the biggest obstacle, the UT officials said.
"That absolutely will impact our world because they're asking the youngster to have 40 percent of their degree credits done after their second year, which no other student on campus has that requirement," Dodds said.
At the same time, the NCAA lowered its admission standards, adopting a sliding scale for SAT scores for athletes. An athlete with a high school grade-point average of 3.55 or higher, for instance, could just sign his name on the SAT, get the minimum 400 score and still qualify for admission under the NCAA guidelines.
"You don't have to be the student you used to be to get into an institution," Dodds said. "They've kind of built a trap for us to get into."
That trap snapped shut several times this semester, beginning with the news that star basketball player P.J. Tucker would not play once the spring semester began because he had not passed the necessary six hours in the fall; he remains enrolled this spring.
Then, baseball pitcher Sam LeCure was dismissed from the university because his grade-point average fell below 2.0; LeCure made an unsuccessful appeal to a federal judge to try to stay in school, citing a learning disability caused by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
This week, the football team announced that two starters and one backup would miss spring drills because of unspecified academic issues.
Those failures occurred despite a system set up to help athletes make the grade at UT. Dodds said UT spends as much per athlete on academic support as any university in the country, including $130,000 a year for upgrading computers and other equipment.
In the wake of the recent problems, Dodds and Plonsky said they are looking into changes in the academic support system. Among the plans is to make Assistant Athletic Director Brian Davis responsible only for the football team, not all nine men's programs that he currently oversees.
Including Davis, UT athletics employs four full-time counselors, an administrative assistant and a life skills/career counselor shared with the women's teams. In addition, UT uses approximately 60 tutors and mentors who work four to 20 hours per week, and the department's compliance office, which makes sure the university stays in step with NCAA rules, also spends some of its time on academics.
In all, about 20 employees are in some way devoted to academics, school officials said.
At least 10 hours of study hall a week is required for all first-year athletes, Davis said. Study hall is also mandatory for upperclassmen deemed to have grade problems or special needs. Class attendance is also checked.
Dodds said that the department tries to give athletes as much support as possible the first two years in the hope they can then be mainstreamed.
"Then they can walk on their own; they can run on their own; they can fly on their own," Dodds said.
In addition to meeting NCAA standards, athletes must meet the same criteria for all students at UT. Students who've taken 15 to 44 credit hours, for example, are placed on academic probation if their GPA falls below 2.0 and are dismissed if it falls below 1.7.
Dodds blames some of the athletes' problems on an increasingly tougher academic environment at UT, particularly in the past five years.
"You can't say, 'OK, let's put everybody over here.' There's no 'over here' to put them. They go out there, they're in diverse curriculums, and they meet the real world head on. Plus, they've got a full-time job in athletics. Their jobs are hard."
More sobering news could arrive when the NCAA sends out its first-ever report cards as soon as next week.
Though UT officials have expressed confidence they'll fare well there, the football program has had some of the worst graduation rates among all Division I-A programs in the past two years.
The NCAA's most recent graduation report showed that only 27 percent of Longhorn football players who were freshmen in 1997-98 had graduated by 2004, the worst rate in the Big 12 Conference and third-worst among 117 NCAA major football programs. By comparison, the graduation rate for all UT students in that class was 71 percent; the rate for all athletes was 52 percent.
To improve his team's rates, football coach Mack Brown says he now strongly factors academics into the recruiting process.
"We have to look at who can pass," Brown said. "Academics are something we've always been concerned about, but (recruiting) continually is getting tougher because of the school."
In the past, poor graduation rates led to bad publicity for a school but no real penalties. That's about to change.
Last month at a convention near Dallas, the NCAA adopted an Academic Performance Program aimed at increasing graduation rates. Schools will now receive report cards for individual sports that measure their short-term academic progress rate and their long-term graduation success rate.
first set of reports, to be made public by the NCAA late this month, will allow universities to see how they stack up. In coming years, penalties will accompany poor performance. A football team, for example, could lose as many as nine scholarships if its scores are bad enough, and chronic offenders could be banned from postseason tournaments and bowl games or even lose their NCAA membership.
UT officials think they're fine by the new standards, but some areas remain gray.
"We're not sure where everyone else is," Dodds said. "We don't know whether we're good, bad or indifferent."
It's academic for Texas athletes
Longhorns who are out this semester for academic reasons:
MEN'S BASKETBALL
P.J. Tucker, sophomore forward
Tucker was the team's leading scorer and rebounder when he was declared ineligible. Texas has lost four of five games since then.
FOOTBALL
Selvin Young, junior running back
Larry Dibbles, junior defensive tackle
Erick Jackson, freshman cornerback
All three will miss spring practice but are expected to return next season. Young's absence may be the most crucial: He missed almost all of the 2004 season with a broken ankle but is favored to be the starting tailback next season.
BASEBALL
Hunter Harris, senior outfielder
Sam LeCure, junior pitcher
LeCure, who was dismissed from school, was expected to have been the team's top starting pitcher. He unsuccessfully asked a federal judge to intervene, claiming that the university did not give him suitable accommodations for a learning disability. Three other baseball players — sophomore Nick Peoples, sophomore transfer Thomas Incaviglia and freshman Preston Clark — have not played because of academic issues, but their status for the rest of the spring is uncertain. 'They're processing some things academically, and that's all I can say,' Coach Augie Garrido said.
-------------------------------------
Mack, dont you hate it when school gets in the way of football? I do wonder how hard Texas will actually get hit with penalties? Probably not so much, but hopefully this will let other schools know that you do need to pay attention academics as well as sports