Editorial: If academic failure cost schools tourney slots, they'd pay more attention to their players' classroom performance.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan doesn't think Kentucky, the top-seeded team in the East Region, should have been invited to the NCAA men's basketball tournament this year. He doesn't think Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Baylor, California, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico State, Tennessee and Washington should be in the field either. That has nothing to do with those teams' hoops prowess. It's about their slipshod academics.
Each of those 12 schools graduated fewer than 40 percent of their players over a four-year span, according to a study released last week by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida. That's unacceptable, Duncan said. If a program wants its athletes to play under college basketball's brightest lights, it must ensure they're succeeding as students: "If you can't manage to graduate two out of five players, how serious are the institution and the coach about their players' academic success? How are you preparing your student athletes for life?"
Easy to answer: They're not, and they're not.
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