College basketball's graduation madness

TENNESSEE WON last year's women's national basketball title with a graduation rate of 100 percent. Its fifth-ranked men's team has a disastrous 25 percent graduation rate for black players. Tennessee women's coach Pat Summitt has written, "I'm someone who will push you beyond all reasonable limits. Someone who will ask you not to just fulfill your potential, but to exceed it. Someone who will expect more from you than you may believe you are capable of."

The coaches of women's teams still expect far more from their athletes than the coaches of the best men's teams. In my annual gender graduation brackets for the teams in the NCAA tournament, the women's teams graduate 73 percent of their African-American players, while the men's teams graduate 51 percent of their black players.

The gaps were most pronounced among the very best teams. The top seven women's teams in the latest Associated Press poll had an average graduation rate for black players of 76 percent, double the 37 percent for black men of the top seven men's teams. Black women on the top seven teams trailed white women in graduation rates by an average of 13 percentage points. Black men on the top seven teams trailed white men in graduation rates by an average of 49 percentage points.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.