If it does, there is no excuse for Cal, Florida International, Troy, San Jose State, Oklahoma, and USC having the same number of scholarships for football as Northwestern, Rice, Boston College, Notre Dame, Stanford, and Duke.
The NCAA has had commercials talking about how many athletes there are in college sports and how almost all of them will be going pro in something other than sports. This is true. So shouldn't they care about the fact that some schools don't care about providing their athletes with a real education?
For the money sports (football and men's basketball), it's actually a disadvantage for schools to care about educating their athletes. As Notre Dame and Stanford have shown, it doesn't mean that you can't succeed on the football field, but it makes it harder. Part of that is unavoidable. Notre Dame and Stanford won't take some of the athletes that the SEC schools take (Vanderbilt is the exception in the SEC). But even for some players that can get into Notre Dame and Stanford, they have to deal with stuff like "Don't go there, it's too hard, they'll make you work" in recruiting.
For the sports where athletes know they won't be able to make a living as a professional athlete, caring about academics is probably an advantage. If you're being recruited to play tennis, you're more likely to care about going to a school where you can get a good education than you would be if you're being recruited to play football. For football and men's basketball, there's no incentive for schools to care about educating their athletes. Let's give them an incentive.
Go back to the 12 schools I mentioned at the top. They're the bottom six and six of the top seven (I took out Air Force, the service academies are a different ballgame) in FBS football graduation rate (click on "Div. I Graduation Success Rates" at the top and then choose football and 2012-13 and search). If they all have 85 scholarship players, that's a total of 1,020 players. Based on current graduation rates, we can expect 731 of those players to graduate.
How can we do better? Reward schools that graduate their players. Give them more scholarships. One problem I have with NCAA sanctions is that when you take scholarships away from USC, Penn State, or Miami, you're not just hurting those schools. You're hurting athletes that have nothing to do with those schools. If USC loses ten scholarships in a year, a football player that would have gone to USC goes to Arizona instead. Then somebody who would have gone to Arizona goes to New Mexico instead. Then somebody would would have gone to New Mexico goes to an FCS school instead. And on and on and on until way down the line somebody who would have gotten a Division II scholarship can't get a scholarship. If you take scholarships away from a school, give them to another school that deserves them.
So let's reward schools that provide their athletes with a quality education. I think there are a lot of ways that it could be done, but I'll give you my suggestion. Put the schools in five groups based on graduation rate. If you're in the bottom 20%, you only get 75 football scholarships. The scholarships that you lose are going to the top 20%, which will get 95. The 21-40% group gets 80 scholarships and the 61-80% group you get 90 scholarships. The middle 20% still gets 85 scholarships. The total number of scholarships stays the same, but we reward schools that are actually going to educate their football players.
Let's go back to the bottom six and the top six. If the top six had 95 scholarships and the bottom six had 75 scholarships, we can expect 758 of their 1,020 players to graduate. I just got the same six schools to graduate 27 more players.
The NCAA's Graduation Success Rate excludes players who transfer if they leave their school in good academic standing. That makes sense. It shouldn't count against a school if a player leaves because he realizes he's not going to play. I think we'd also have to exclude players who leave after three years and get drafted in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft. If you leave after three years and get drafted after the third round, you probably should have gone back to school. But let's just say that Cal's 44% graduation rate isn't because 56% of their players are leaving early for the NFL.
Cal's 44% graduation rate is a disgrace (especially for a school that is supposed to be one of the best state schools in the country). Oklahoma's 51% is a disgrace. Clearly, they don't care about educating their football players. LSU's 74% isn't horrendous, but it's just not good enough. If football powerhouses are going to lose scholarships based on not providing their players with an education, they're going to start to care. Graduation rates will improve (which could certainly lead to schools handing out meaningless degrees, but what's going on now is just as bad). Even if they didn't improve, more athletes would be graduating because more would be going to schools that will provide a real education.
Northwestern, Rice, Boston College, Notre Dame, Stanford, and Duke are doing what they are supposed to when so many schools aren't. They deserve to have the advantage.
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