As you can see some teams do very well, others not so much. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that participation in post season athletics should be tied to graduation rates. He was referring to basketball, but for arguments sake lets also apply it to football. What would be an acceptable rate?
I think the bottom has to be 50%. Graduating half of your athletes should be the minimum expectation. By that standard both Oklahoma and Oregon would be eliminated. But, is that really a good standard? Is 60% better? At that cutoff we begin losing more. What about 2/3 of athletes graduating (66%)? That seems to me like a reasonable expectation, but that would mean that only Stanford, UConn and Virginia Tech would remain
Now in some ways comparing these numbers to each other is tough because sometimes we are comparing apples to oranges, so what if we tied it to the graduation rates of the institutions were the students were attending. After all, if the school is only graduating 40% of its students then we should see that 60% of athletes graduating is really good. So let's look at football player graduation rates in comparison.
Now we could say that athletes should be graduating at or above the general population, but by that standard only UConn would qualify. It would also be unfair to Stanford which would have to graduate 95% of its players versus 58% for Arkansas.
Personally I would set a limit somewhere in the 60s as an acceptable target, although obviously I would not be opposed to going higher. In fact, maybe a formula derived on a running average every five years is better, so that as schools do better the expectation also goes up.
Making post season appearances tied to graduation rates would make sure that coaches and athletic departments start paying attention to what their kids are doing. It would also try to eliminate some of the hypocrisy in the claim that these players are "student-athletes." In the big programs at the big schools they are often students in name only. Let's change that.
The vast majority of these athletes will never play professional sports, and of those that do, only a very small portion will remain for more than a couple of years and make enough money to support themselves for the rest of their lives. That means that the only other thing they will have to fall back on is their education and their diploma so let's do everything we can to make sure they at least have that.
The current free for all simply doesn't benefit the student, although it certainly benefits the coaches, universities and the NCAA who make millions of dollars off of these athletes.
I got the information on athlete graduation rates here, and school graduation rates here.
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