Reform Fallout Creates Window for Keeping NCAA Intact with New Division

Significant organizational change usually requires powerful urgency, emerging coalitions and a window of opportunity to move against resistance to change. The last three years of uneven reform efforts by the NCAA built the reform coalition, but its failures fashioned the sense of urgency and window to change NCAA governance with a new division.

The Window of Opportunity

The paradox driving a new Division in the NCAA lies in how the reform failures created the necessary strategic window to mobilize everyone to achieve the long needed action. None of this could have happened without the NCAA Presidents efforts to reform academics, enforcement and rules of the last four years. The uneven pace and above all the Division 1 membership overrides of critical reforms finally exposed the inability of the class riven Division 1 to change it.

Remember the Presidents working with NCAA President Emmert had to go around the NCAA governance structure to pass most of the reforms. They knew real reforms would be stymied by the vetoes and pace of the Confederated NCAA. The Presidents worked through study groups and their Executive Committee that represented each conference.  In short periods of time they passed a set of strong academic, student welfare and enforcement reforms. Some of the best academic reforms and the new structure of coaching accountability along with systematized enforcement penalties go into place in August 2013.

Time and again, if the reforms cost money, the membership of Division 1 rose up and slapped down the changes. This finally revealed the class riven structural inability of the present Division 1 group to do simple justice to student athletes and reform the rulebook.

Keeping the NCAA Intact

This failed effort carved out the window to do what many have known needed to be done for the last ten years—launch a new NCAA division. Leaving the media pundits and SEC aside, most schools never favored seceding from the NCAA but wanted to create a new Division based on wealth and football status. The wealth inequalities had become too great and undermined efforts to simplify rules or get student athletes just stipends. This emerging focus, finally articulated by the super Conference Commissioners, focuses on keeping  the NCAA intact and nestling the super conferences in a different division. It represents a great success for the Presidents and Presidential control. Unlike  athletic directors and media pundits, the Presidents understand the academic dimensions of college sports and preferred to keep the NCAA and Presidential control intact.

The NCAA remains a voluntary professional membership organization with a weak presidential structure divided into three plus divisions each of which sets its own rules. The confederated structure vests power in the vote of the membership. The committees are designed with equal distribution of divisions to ensure that the common rules take into account all the diverse needs of widely diverse schools with different regions, academic and social missions as well as wealth.

Confederated structures are cumbersome and slow;

they are designed that way to elicit consensus and attend to everyone’s concerns. Masticated mush often comes out after four years of effort. But it does keep a strong focus upon student athletes and welfare across all the divisions and does a pretty good job of governing sports and running tournaments. It also does not mean that the same rules apply on all fronts to Division 1 or 3.

Keeping the NCAA intact matters. None of the Presidents and conferences wanted to rebuild the infrastructure or eliminate other sports. The organization does:

•  a great job of running tournaments; 
• a good job of managing rules of the game and adapting changes; 
• a relatively good job of distributing tournament money equitably and encouraging academic integrity; 
• a relatively good job of setting academic standards, attending to racial disparities and diversity issues; 
• an OK job of trying to manage the admissions and qualification processes as well as keeping up with the endless corruptions of the process; 
• a decent job of managing the complex international issues and Olympic and national competition issues involved in college athletics; 
• it does a really good job of day-to-day consulting and staying on top the endless array of NCAA rules and violations that keep endless consulting and conference calls between schools and NCAA on the vast majority of enforcement issues. Enforcement will always be a problem for any self-governing membership organization.

The NCAA awards championships in the following sports:

Baseball Division I Division II Division III Basketball Men's Division I Division II Division III Women's Division I Division II Division III Bowling Cross Country Men's Women's Fencing Field Hockey Football Division I (FCS) Division II Division III

Golf Men's Division I Division II Division III Women's Division I Division II Division III Gymnastics Men's Women's Ice Hockey Men's Women's Lacrosse Men's Women's Rifle Rowing Skiing Soccer Men's Women's

Softball Division I Division II Division III Swimming and Diving Men's Women's Tennis Men's Women's Track and Field Indoor Men's Women's Outdoor Men's Women's Volleyball Men's National Collegiate Division III Women's Water Polo Men's Women's Wrestling

No one has done enforcement well. Historically the NCAA ended up with enforcement because Conferences failed miserably at self-enforcement. Conferences handed it over to the NCAA because they could not successfully make and enforce their own rules without tearing themselves apart over conflict of interest and internecine battles. College athletics is too small a professional world and conferences way too small to achieve self-enforcement model without inherent conflict of interest. At the same time, serious enforcement in a confederated model will always take time and care especially without subpoena powers and when people have an incentive to lie. Whatever the rhetoric, the conferences don’t want and can’t do enforcement.

The new enforcement reforms clarify violation levels and expected punishments for rules violations makes huge progress. Most importantly it should limit discretion for most violations and make penalties more consistent and reliable.  Nothing will eliminate the need for careful, slow and slogging investigations and judgments on major messes. 

The NCAA has and will struggle, as do all self-governing organizations, to create a strong and independent and timely enforcement structure. These challenges will never go away and admit no easy solutions. It is important to remember that without subpoena power and facing incentives to lie, NCAA enforcement will take time and require accountability. The NCAA must get a more professionalized enforcement structure. But no self-governing professional association ever gets it right and will always be adapting and changing over time.

Class Divisions Paralyze Present Division 1

The real issue lies not in tension among divisions but the rift within Division 1. Here football super conference schools benefit from the modern media contracts, even though most still lose money. The five power conferences uneasily coexist with two other groups. The other football schools, usually lumped as mid-majors, do not have great media contracts and will never get them. They hemorrhage money. Even bleeding money, these schools desperately cling to football for reasons of prestige and visibility. They hope to sneak one representative into the major bowls or go to a minor a bowl where they will lose more money. The third Division 1 group encompasses the basketball only schools that fight to be in Division 1 to get access to the NCAA tournament.

Bob Bowlsby, the Commissioner of Big 12 and superb athletic director at Stanford and Iowa, pointed out that the NCAA had made it too easy to get into Division 1. Schools that can barely afford it clamor for the prestige and the NCAA tournaments and bowl access. This increase in size of Division 1 results in a fundamental rift between the super conference football schools—the BCS—and the rest. This rift is directly responsible for the incomplete reforms.

The mid major football schools and most basketball only schools oppose reforms and innovations that would cost more money. Reform efforts to mandate summer school and transition programs for at risk athletes were voted down because of cost consideration but glossed as academic freedom. One of the straws that broke the camel’s back lay in the override vote on class lines Division 1 that voted down the simple justice of providing cost of attendance stipends to college athletes. People pretended it was about  academic freedom issues and complaints about not having worked out all the glitches with Pell Grants, it really resulted in straight up class warfare where the have-nots and barely haves resist all student welfare and many academic reforms that would cost money and increase their perpetual deficits. The obsession with limiting cost and equalizing the playing field paralyze real reform for student welfare or rule simplification.

The second logic of this class split plays out in an obsession with rules designed to equalize the playing field. The excess of NCAA rules grows from two sources. First, many seek to avoid the grotesque special treatments that coaches pushed to recruit student athletes such as private jet rides, lavish gifts, clubbing, girls or banquets that undermined a legitimate and ongoing attempt to emphasize the student, not just the athlete. These will remain and as schools deregulate, they will return.

The other driver to proliferate minutiae rules comes from a fixation by less well off schools to minimize the advantages in recruiting student athletes by the richer schools. These can range from limits on meal expenditures, to limits on travel or to rein in boosters—remember in the fifties boosters just paid for students tuition and board on their own—to limits upon the amount of paper and size of books. Even attempts to deregulate communication with high school athletes failed here. The arcane and minute rules about level playing fields resulted from salutary desire to minimize arms race costs, but mainly to protect some chance to compete for student athletes by less rich schools.

This lead to the endless proliferation of rules; some make sense such as limits on gifts or booster access; some are just crazy such as communication limits. The reality is that great student athletes go to the top programs to win and compete. They follow the best coaches and the best chances to compete at highest level, get media exposure and win championships and in some cases prepare to become professional athletes. No amount of minutia tying up phone call limits will change these realities.  Yet this attempt to tie down the giants, as results in endless rules, more cost and fails as Gulliver’s Lilliputians learned.

Creating a new division will not solve all these issues. There will exist the cleavage between the superrich—Ohio State and Texas—the rich Michigan, North Carolina, USC—and the not really rich, Mississippi State, Washington State. But all the schools will have a reasonable chance to compete given the lifeline of TV football contracts.

New Division and Presidential Control

Keeping it in the NCAA also keeps the Presidents in charge. In the last two years, athletic directors using media contacts have waged a covert campaign to paint Presidents as too far away and out of it. Sometimes this is the case, but Presidents are actually responsible for educational institutions and keeping an educational component alive in sports; athletic directors only do so if driven by Presidents. The Presidents will keep control, hire and fire athletic directors, and attempt to keep an academic component in the world of athletics. Student athletes enter as students and the greatest long-term obligation of schools is to educate the 90,000 who graduate each year and do not become professional athletes not just focus about the 450 possible professionals the media cares about.

I want to make one point clear. The college presidents drive reforms, not the athletic directors. No major academic reforms and no major reform movements ever came from athletic directors. It is not they are bad guys, most are honorable and hard working, but they labor under intense short terms pressures to make money and create winners. They are not hired as educators and their incentives undermine that mission. Even when committed to student welfare and education, any reform that adds to complexity, requires more investment and means more accountability will be questioned. For some the academic component feels like a bother.

The paradox of the present moment of change lies in how the window of opportunity grew from both the successes—academic standards, graduation rates and higher penalties for lower graduation rates—and failures that manifest the intractable intransigence of the Division 1 have-nots. This window exposes the present form of Division 1 as a failed government approach. It needs to be reconfigured with a new division to transcend the class resistance to academic and simple justice reforms. If the NCAA membership as a whole does not respond to the legitimate concerns of the power conferences and the Presidents, it will fail as an institution.

Will Athletes Finally Reject Code of Silence?

Major League Baseball’s suspension of 12 players for using performance enhancing drugs reminds us again that a Code of Silence among athletes protect and abets illegal and unfair drug usage. Players in clubhouses generally knew who cheats; but everyone keeps silent.

 Fellow athletes know that using performance-enhancing drugs is illegal; they know users put the rest of them at a disadvantage in competition; they know using stops other younger players from playing; they know these enhanced players denigrate the game’s integrity. They know it is wrong, but they remain silent. Their silence undermines integrity as they collaborate in the cheating and scandals.

 

Until this Code of Silence dies, this cheating and unfair advantage will continue.

Let’s be honest. In the search for advantage in a brutal and competitive landscape, some players will cheat. This happens in any profession in a competitive world with real stakes. Every profession, sports included, has to self-regulate to limit the cheating and advantages that accrue to the cheaters.

The two ways to discourage cheating involve:

1)   Change the risk/reward calculation of the person tempted to cheat. The equation balances the probability of getting caught and the projected severity of the punishment against the gain in production, salary and longevity. 

2)   Change the culture of support or silence among teammates and fellow professional. If this culture is a “no snitch culture, athletes will not report and tolerate the use of performance enhancing technologies. When fellow professionals do not speak up, this makes hiding it easier and tilts the risk/reward calculus towards using.

Any sport seeking to discourage performance-enhancing technologies must have a rigorous, comprehensive and up to date testing system. To be accepted it requires due process to protect athlete rights, and serious and consistent penalties that players will accept as fair. This is a hard and requires evolving techniques to deal with the stealth and technologies of the cheaters. Strong programs need the support of professionals, in this case, athletes, to ensure wide compliance, a culture that supports it and avoids litigation.

This is where so many sports failed. The hostility between athletes and owners or regulating bodies generates a we versus them approach. Teammates band together against the “other.” This we/they intensifies the natural dynamic of any team to band together to support each other. The protective bonding grows from athletes’ desire to protect each other’s private life from the prying and reckless inquiries of the media.

This hostility is deepened in union policy and a history of owners who have colluded against players in baseball. The hostility of unions to strong drug testing programs reflected this distrust and the players’ legitimate fear that owners would misuse the testing to target them. Only in the last seven years have unions and management comes together to agree on stronger protocols, confidentiality protections and appeal processes. Both sides recognized that the credibility of the game itself had come under attack. But the Code remained intact and almost all the discovery of cheaters occurred with testing or investigations, none involved peers reporting users.

Leaving aside the travesty of modern cycling and the bankruptcy of sprints with its Ben Johnson’s and Marian Jones, no major sport has been so afflicted by performance-enhancing technologies as baseball. An entire era and all the accomplishments of that time are contaminated by wide use. This usage was common knowledge among other players, but everyone remained silent and collaborated in the era’s dishonesty; everyone but the reviled Jose Conseco. As Curt Schilling pointed out his accusations turned out to be accurate.

This Code of Silence can nullify strong testing programs. The testing programs need players to reject the Code. The Code of Silence among professionals reflects shared values and keeping each other’s back. It reflects everyone’s awareness that no one is pure and that the media will tear careers apart on the slightest excuse. It may even reflect an awareness that players feel they are benefitting from having the cheaters on their team at the moment or the fear that at some point in the future a player might want to use PEDs to augment their own declining career.

In many ways, however, modern professional sports do not have teams in the traditional sense. Teams turnover occurs every three to four years. Players are regularly cut, traded or sent to the minor leagues. During the course of a year, a baseball team can have a thirty percent turn over. The Code of Silence has its most power on teams, but has been embraced by the entire profession as players move so often now. This extension to the entire league makes even less moral sense because once you are on another team, the player you know who cheats will hurt you by his enhanced performance.

This Code possesses great moral weight as a “no snitch” rule among players. However, it strikes poses serious moral threats to the game itself and to players’ own integrity and career chances. Use of performance-enhancing technologies violates the integrity of the game, violates the integrity of the players who remain silent and collaborate in its use. The Code permits use and this hurts the silent players by shielding athletes who as opponents will have a decided advantage over honest players who do not use.

The Code’s power is impressive because players hurt their self-interest and violate their own commitment to the game’s integrity by remaining silence. The no snitch rule, us against them, and having each other’s back all push athletes to remain silent or “live and let live.” The problem here is that this is not live and let live.

Letting live means letting users prey on other players, including you. It harms all honest players. It also harms the future of the league because scouts cannot accurately assess talent if minor leaguers are using performance enhancers.

Silence and protecting performance enhancing users denies younger players a chance to get into games. It also keeps younger players who deserve a chance in the minors when enhanced athletes stay in the major leagues by virtue of enhanced performance. Silence indulges users. This behavior is wrong and hurts people. It is not live and let live.

Finally enhanced athletes as teammates and friends because they must lie all the time. PED users lie to fans and carve out performance records that are lies. But they also lie to themselves. We know from psychology that anyone who tells him or she a narrative long enough can come to believe it to be true. Self-deceivers lose their identity and live a lie given how much time they spend lying to themselves. Marion Jones, Ben Johnson, Alex Rodriquez, Mark MacGwire all could probably pass lie detector test because they had convinced themselves of the truth of their charade.

I hope that the cracks in the code are widening with the last round of exposures. The deceit of Ryan Braun is especially important. Braun is a widely liked and marketed star. He had publically apologized and swore to fans, teammates and owners that he was not enhancing his performance. He swore to athletes who regarded themselves as his friend and protector like Aaron Rodgers the quarterback of the Packers who claimed he would bet one year of his salary on Braun being clean.

Players, coaches and owners feel betrayed at a very personal level by Braun’s actions. The lies of 12 other players compounds and ripples across the major leagues. The deceit required poisons team cohesion and friendships. It also taints the achievement of every honest star that might fight the perception he or she is using.

If the Code is broken it can occur in three ways:

1. Some players will whistle blow quietly but effectively. One of the issues that has hurt all investigations is the militant silence of the players towards other players on these issues. This needs to end.
2. Players need to shun and shame the abusers and enhancers. This will take effort in the locker rooms and in union meetings and in discussions. Peer pressure can discourage would be users and at least ensure that past users can’t just pretend it never happened and return to normal. Peer pressure and force can be as powerful as occasional whistle blowing.
3. The most powerful change in player attitude can play out with strong union support for permitting contracts to be broken and renegotiated with abusers. The union could also negotiate two strike rules against athletes who get caught a second time; this avoids the false positive issues. Both these approaches will take real constraints upon the owners who players fear will use drug issues to abort bad or foolish long-term contracts. But a change in player attitudes can play out with changed and harsher penalties in the contracts.      

Up to this point fellow athletes have sacrificed their own integrity and their own career prospects by abiding by a Code of Silence to protect cheaters and enhancers. This silence helps keep young players on the bench and in the minor. It disadvantages every player who must play against the performance enhancers. It makes the game a joke to those who love it and play it. It is time for players to reject the code and whistle blow, ostracize the users and push to change the penalties.

Social Justice and College Sports

Two weeks ago I was picking up a car at Enterprise Rental and had to talk to the manager. I thought I recognized him and asked his name. Sure enough, he had played defensive end for UW nine years ago, graduated and now managed this branch complete in white shirt and tie and spread sheet analysis. We talked awhile, and he mentioned how scared he had been arriving at UW as a highly recruited three star recruit-but with horrible SAT scores and miserable GPA. He spoke of how difficult and depressing the first two years had been learning to be a student and things like getting his first coat and tie and learning how to study and behave on the road.  “It was hard, really hard, but I graduated. Now I’m on my way up in the company.” That was his summary.

By historical accident, college sports have become an agent of social justice on college campuses. In this discussion I will narrow my discussion to issues of minority access to colleges, but could just as easily have talked about the college athletics contributions  surrounding women's access and achievement. Each year thirty to fifty young minority males who would normally not get accepted are admitted to colleges across the country as student athletes. All the algorithms predict that these minority males should fail. Yet six years later sixty to eighty percent of them graduate. Each year college athletics helps minority students who by all majors should fail in college.

Many state colleges can admit unprepared student athletes as a normal part of their mission. College athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds both from broken urban areas and poor barren rural areas come from underfunded and disorganized public schools. They have neither the social resources nor academic support to achieve the SAT/ACT scores or fluid literacy to get into good private or flagship state colleges.

90% of minority and white students from these class backgrounds will never graduate from college. Elite publics and privates have trace elements of non-Asian male minority students on campuses. The triage of American higher education requires high-standardized scores, high grade point averages and high quality essays. These schools traditionally have few minority males based upon the collapsed pipelines from high schools. The end result black male students represent 2.7% of the population at flagship state universities compared to 7% of school age population. Minority males graduate at the lowest rate of any groups in colleges.

Many of the black and other minority presences on campus derive from recruiting and stocking up high achieving minority students. These schools seldom recruit minorities from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds get to these schools. College athletics enters the scene in recruiting and trying to educate minority from ill prepared backgrounds who would be consigned to the waste heap by normal admission andoutreach approaches. 

The few students from these backgrounds arrive at college struggling to master the textbooks, unused to the workloads and behind from the first day. Without strong support they fail at astronomical rates and have the highest non-graduation rates of any groups in college.  

Paradoxically college athletics has figured out a way to recruit, train and graduate these students. On many of these campuses athletes comprise very high percentage of the minority males on that campus In addition these destined to fail students graduate at rates far beyond anything that would be predicted by their academic profiles.

The difficulty in finding minority male students prepared to succeed academically is well documented. What is often ignored is that in a number of flagship state and private schools student athletes can make up as high as twenty to thirty percent of minority males in groups such as African American, Hispanic or Pacific Islander populations. This far exceeds the population ratios for the student body.

This reflects the collapse of the social and academic pipelines to these schools of prepared minority males. This is not an ideal situation, and no one in their right minds wants minority males investing immense amounts of effort into athletes rather than academics. Many males do not have the support structure to build opportunities for sustained academic success and mentoring. They find success, identity and most importantly engaged adults in sports. They claw their way out through sports, and colleges who accept them have the opportunity and obligation to not just train them as athletes but as real students. Modern NCAA rules require prospective student athletes to take a defined list of college core classes with minimum grades to even be considered for scholarships. A desire to play college ball is linked to getting a high school education. Colleges have an ethical obligation to invest in them so that student athletes leave school not as ex-athletes without a future, but as educated young men who will contribute to their own and their society’s future.

The relatively high graduation rates of admitted minority males who would not normally get into college or succeed remain one of the unsung achievements and lessons of college athletics. The average black athlete graduates at a 17 percent higher rate than black regular students. Black student athletes still graduate at 68% rate versus 87% rates with white athletes, but the rate has gone up considerably as the reforms of 2003-4 start to take effect.  At the same time minority male student athletes especially in basketball still tend to graduate at lower rates than anticipated.

Most student athletes come into college identifying as athletes. They have excelled as athletes and received praise and success as athletes. A very high percentage of student athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds expect to become professional athletes. 70 percent of the basketball players in Division II expect to become professionals when they enroll as freshmen!

Left on their own as athletes without significant social and academic support, these minority athletes will fail at high rates. The much lower graduation rates at Division I championship schools reflects the importance of economic investment in support. Student athletes get in, but these schools do not have the resources of the will to invest in significant academic and social support to help the young athletes develop as students and change their identity focus. To be blunt, admitting disadvantaged student athletes without serious investment in academic and social support amounts to exploitation—they will predictably fail at very high rates.

For underprepared and disadvantaged student athletes to succeed two processes have to occur. First, they have to come to a new understanding of themselves as students. This requires getting the basic skills and confidence to compete in the same classroom with well-prepared peers. Second, the students need the academic and social support to get over the first two very hard years where they struggle like fish out of water.

Athletics achieves this by leveraging the student athlete’s passion to play sports just as new rules require high school athletes to take better classes and get better grades. Under NCAA rules the student must make progress towards degree by taking a set of classes in percentage increments, passing the classes and finding a degree over a three-year arc. Unless student athletes meet these rules they cannot play. These formal rules will only really work if the coaches strongly, let me emphasize strongly, push classroom attendance and education. If athletes experience lost playing time or practice time tied to academic attendances and performance, they will show up.

The first two years are critical for support. The student athletes grapple with succeeding in alien classrooms where the stakes and standards are higher than they have ever experienced. The introduction to academic classes needs to occur slowly.

We need to be honest here. Most of these athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds have failed as students. Academic classrooms are places of anguish and failure for them. They face an alien culture that many of their middle class students take for granted. So most successful programs start out student athletes in prep classes to introduce them to the demands of modern college classrooms. They take a trajectory of classes for small successes. This slow preparation takes around two years to acclimate student athletes into functioning as students in the practiced way many middle class or successful working class kids take for granted.

Good academic support programs build in strong tutoring, study tables. This takes economic investment to ensure students master basic skills and confidence as students to compete in the classroom. If the system works, then in their junior years student athletes begin to identify as students also, but also begin to realize that they will not be professionals—although this confidence can be invincible when third string corner backs still believe they will be professionals some day.

The other huge lesson and advantage lies in the community and structure that surround athletes. In even off-season they work 30-40 hours a week on athletics. This surrounds them with a community of peers and adults. The structure gives them a purpose and leverages the purpose towards keeping the student focused when they face the chaotic, strange and seemingly hostile academic world of major universities.

This structure and community can be replicated for non-athlete students. Programs that succeed in educating students from disadvantaged backgrounds do so with programs that provide purpose, strong initial academic support and a community structure—the very attributes that college athletes provides. The data on increasing not only minority but also all student graduation rates builds upon community and support structures.  

The academic and social support is not perfect and can be abused. But they help compensate for the very heavy and required work load that the athletic scholarship burdens

All the support in the world will not matter if coaches do not bring push connecting learning in the classroom to desire to play. Most college coaches are teaching at college because they believe in helping educate the student athletes as well as coaching sports and winning. In addition the coaches and universities now have strong incentives to push for academic progress because off potential lost scholarships and worse lost opportunity to play in NCAA tournaments or bowl games.

I am not naive. A high percentage of minority athletes end up in majors that look like dead ends, especially often maligned ethnic studies. These claims often do injustice do many ethnic study programs that have strong social science and humanities components. But it is important to remember that most college students end up in majors that do not prepare them for jobs. This is not the point of most social sciences and humanities; they prepare students to read with understanding, write well and think critically. They provide general adaptable cognitive frameworks for how to learn and master subjects in a wide variety of settings. All students from these backgrounds face short-term challenges in this job market.

The graduation rate of minority male student athletes has improved for the last several years reflecting consistently tighter and more aggressive academic reforms ranging from higher high school requirements to mandate progress to degree to new penalties for lower graduation rates that kept schools like Connecticut. The one spot that continues to resist reform efforts remains men’s basketball especially at mid major schools who use it to get tournament access. College basketball has by far the most corrupt feeder system, and the one and done mentality encourages less high school preparation, less investment in athletes once they arrive and leads to a culture of rampant transfers to gain playing time. Unfortunately transferring leads to lower GPA and a much lower probability of graduation.  The roots of basketball sport are now so compromised and so many schools have so little money for academic support that I remain deeply pessimistic that the universities will be able to achieve the social justice possibilities in basketball that present themselves elsewhere.

This combination of purpose, support and structure can provide the context for academically and economically disadvantaged students to integrate in and succeed in quality academic settings. This stands as a success, paradox and challenge of college sports.