Worst offenders risk ruining a sport's image

Day 2 of a dialogue between Derrick Z. Jackson and Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross, on graduation rates and college athletics.

Hello Victor, First of all, congratulations on teaching at a true student-athlete college!

You are absolutely right about the overall picture of Division 1 men's basketball players not being as grim as depicted in my annual brackets. The problem, and the reason I do the brackets every year, is that the overall statistics for Division 1 disintegrate when it comes to the top teams in the land.

First, the good guys. There are a handful of schools in the Associated Press Top 25 where the black male player graduation rate is dramatically more than for all black males on campus. Using federal graduation rates, currently the most apples-to-apples comparison, these teams include Southern Illinois (75 percent for black players to 26 percent for black students), Butler (71 to 50), and Winthrop (75 to 55). Defending national champion and third-ranked Florida and fourth-ranked North Carolina should be noted as the only other schools in the Top 25 to have at least a 60 percent graduation rate for both black basketball players and black men in general.

It is all downhill from there. A subset of schools in the Top 25 have awful graduation rates for black male players that merely mirror the sad rates for the black male student body. This is true for top-ranked Ohio State (40 percent for black male players, 38 percent black male students), second-ranked Kansas (33 and 33), fifth-ranked Memphis (29 and 22), 15th-ranked Nevada (25 and 25), 16th-ranked Louisville (17 and 22), and 19th-ranked Nevada-Las Vegas (17 and 25).

The worst is yet to come. As you point out, the overall Division 1 graduation rate of black male players is higher than the rate for black male students, 5 percentage points better, to be exact, in the federal stats.

But among the Top 25, 15 schools have black player graduation rates so far behind those of black students that the average black-on-black gap is a whopping 26 percentage points!

The top offenders are Maryland (0 and 52 percent), UCLA (14 and 58), Georgetown (38 and 80), Texas A&M (13 and 54), Oregon (0 and 39), Southern California (30 and 66), and Tennessee (8 and 41).

As long as colleges allow such disparities amongst the best teams, even among just black students, they risk ruining the image of sports for everyone else.

Victor, thank you for reading my column and I look forward to your next thoughts on this.

Go Holy Cross (next year)! -DERRICK Z.