Athletes and parents should do the math

Congratulations to the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, the 2017 winner of the NCAA National Basketball Championships, more generally called March Madness. While we still have visions of that “One Shining Moment” playing in our heads, we must first recognize that the NCAA has turned this tournament into a marketing Juggernaut that is unparallelled in college sport. March Madness holds the country’s attention as 68 teams get whittled down in nail-biter after buzzer-beater starting in the middle of March, ending on April 3, this year.

Many of the players will exit the stage to a professional career, but it’s important to note: the vast majority of players will never set foot in a professional basketball team’s locker room.

Invariably, when young children, even teenagers, are asked what they want to be when they grow up, many will say they want to play in the NBA. Nothing wrong with a dream, but it’s important for adults to help them do the math.

Starting at the high school athlete and sticking to basketball for this exercise, according to the NCAA, the chances are pretty slim for any of the 546,428 high school basketball players to ever play college hoops — only 3.4 percent at either a Division 1, Division II or Division III, NCAA school. Only 1 percent will play at a D-1 school.

How many of the 3.4 percent who play college ball will move on to the next level and play professionally? According to the NCAA, there were 4,152 draft eligible basketball players in 2016, but there were only 60 NBA slots and only 44 of those slots went to NCAA players, the other 16 went to international players who didn’t attend colleges in the U.S. As a percentage, that’s a whopping 1 percent of NCAA players making it to the professional ranks.

There are dreams and there are dreams and adults and particularly marketers and the NCAA make fortunes off selling those dreams that will for the majority of athletes — never come true.

And for many, the promise of a college degree also turns to dust. Oregon, one of the teams in the Final Four, according to the Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida, had a Graduation Success Rate of under 40 percent, one of only two teams (The University of New Orleans) to rank so low. And there is another troubling trend. Dr. Richard Lapchick, the director of the institute and primary author of the study said, “After years of unabated progress, the 2017 report shows a slight decline in the progress of African-American student-athletes. The GSR numbers for African-American male basketball student-athletes decreased from 75 percent in 2016 to 74 percent in 2017. The GSR for white male basketball student-athletes remained the same at 93 percent in 2016 and 2017. The gap between the rates of white and African- American male basketball student athletes increased to 19 percent in 2017 from 18 percent in 2016. This is the first increase in the gap since the 2011 season.”

The study also points out that “In 2017, 22 percent of the men’s teams had a GSR disparity of greater than 30 percent between white student-athletes and African-American student-athletes versus 18 percent of teams with that disparity in the 2016 tournament. Additionally, 13 percent of teams in 2017 versus 12 percent in 2016 had a GSR disparity of greater than 40 percent.”

Another measure used in the study is the Academic Progress Rate. In 2017, if a school’s APR was below 930, it could lose up to 10 percent of its scholarships and not qualify for post season play the following year. In 2016, the minimum APR was 925. Only one team scored below 930, The University of New Orleans.

But there is good news on that front as well. Twelve teams had an APR of 100 and three out of the four Final Four teams had an APR of 980 or above.

Parents and athletes have to look more deeply, not only into the athletic programs colleges and universities offer, but the academic success rates of those schools. What good is “One Shining Moment” if it doesn’t end crossing a stage and receiving a diploma at graduation?

This story was originally published April 8, 2017 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Athletes and parents should do the math."