The 44-year-old head coach of men's basketball at the University of South Florida, Seth Greenberg, was talking up an alumni benefit game last spring. The inaugural USF Roundball Reunion raised scholarship money for former Bulls players who dropped out after using up their athletic eligibility and later re-enrolled on their own in hopes of finally earning a degree.
"It's important that we have finances to make sure that our alumni can come back and have something tangible to show, and that's a degree," Greenberg told the St. Petersburg Times. "A program is only as good as its graduates."
Using Greenberg's measuring stick, the USF men's basketball program hasn't been very good.
The U.S. Congress and the American governing body of intercollegiate sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, require universities to report graduation rates of student-athletes on an annual basis. In the 2000 report, the NCAA had USF graduating 100 percent of male basketball players. But a closer examination of the report shows a disturbing trend.
Most colleges prefer that full-time students obtain an undergraduate degree in four years. The NCAA gives players who attend with financial aid based on their athletic ability six years to graduate before they are counted in the report.
The 100 percent graduation rate for men's basketball, duly noted in a USF Athletic Department "Points of Pride" handout, covers the freshmen class that entered in the fall of 1993. There were somewhere between one and five basketball recruits in that class. (The NCAA specifies the number of student-athletes within each class only in ranges, so as to thwart attempts to pinpoint the academic record of an individual player.)
On a broader scale, however, just 17 percent of male basketball players who entered USF as freshmen between 1990 and 1993 graduated within six years. That mark could include up to 10 frosh coming in during those years, and it excludes at least as many transfers from other schools. The USF men's basketball graduation rate for the four classes was the lowest of any Division I school in Florida. (Florida A&M University was next lowest for men's basketball at 21 percent.)
In USF's defense, the 1990-93 period that produced the not-so-sweet 17 percent appears to have been a particularly bad patch for the school to find scholastically inclined basketball recruits. During the second half of the 1980s, about one-third of freshmen with grants-in-aid to play hoops graduated within six years.
"I'm honestly surprised it's 17," said former basketball forward Vince Hyatt, who came to USF as a junior in 1992 and graduated with his class in 1994. "I'm thinking it would probably be in the 30s, 40 percent maybe."
The reason for his low estimate is that teammates left school early to play professionally, said Hyatt, whose USF elementary-education degree wasn't counted under NCAA rules because he was a junior-college transfer. Players were booted off the team too. Five players from that era were dismissed for academic or other disciplinary reasons, according to a Weekly Planet review of USF records and news reports. Two freshmen failed to make minimum test scores required for enrollment after getting scholarships, and another pair of freshmen transferred after flunking drug tests.
The absence of degrees among ex-college basketball players extends beyond the Tampa campus of USF. The problem has become so widespread that it has even caught the attention of the NCAA. The association slam-dunks millions of dollars in broadcast fees into the coffers of member institutions every year through the sweat of student-athletes hustling in hyped-up TV events such as the men's tourney this month, better known as "March Madness."
The NCAA formed a study group in 1998 that recommended schools with graduation rates above 74 percent be allowed to grant an extra basketball scholarship. At the other end, schools like USF, with four-year graduation rates below 33 percent, would forfeit a scholarship.
NCAA critics have yet to be won over. "This is punishment?" wrote Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson last year. Schools turn out "a bunch of dunces and all that happens" is they are "deprived of a benchwarmer whose name will never make the paper? Please."
More than two years after the recommendation, the NCAA is still kicking around graduation-incentive plans. The proposals give schools plenty of wiggle room. For example, student-athletes transferring out in good academic standing wouldn't count against a school's graduation rate, as they do now.
At USF, the women's basketball team has suffered through a year of former players making more headlines in legal courts than current squad members on basketball courts. Lawsuits, investigations and a purported cover-up of alleged racial discrimination culminated in last week's ouster of Athletic Director Paul Griffin. But, before the turmoil of the 2000-01 season, at least the women's team graduated half of the 11 to 15 freshmen who entered from 1990 to 1993.
That's a pleasant contrast with the men's team.
It is small consolation for USF administrators to know that their men's program wasn't the worst academically in their basketball league, Conference USA. The universities of Cincinnati and Louisville finished beneath USF, graduating just 8 percent and 9 percent of their basketball players, respectively. The University of Memphis tossed up an air ball, graduating zero freshmen recruits from the 1990 through 1993 classes.
Most of this shouldn't reflect on Greenberg — yet. He was hired from Long Beach State on April 3, 1996, so Greenberg's first true USF recruiting class enrolled in the fall of 1997 and won't show up in an NCAA graduation report for another three years. Greenberg did do some self-inflicted damage to the USF basketball graduation rate early on. In the spring of 1997, after going 8-19 in his first season with holdovers from his predecessor, Greenberg withdrew scholarships for a freshman and a sophomore he had inherited from former coach Bobby Paschal.
"Are they being run off? I wouldn't call it that because we're giving them options," Greenberg told The Tampa Tribune at the time. "I told them very specifically that they wouldn't play much, if at all, for us next season. We're making calls on their behalf to get them at schools where they will play."
That is about the extent of the compassion that a major-college coach can show toward players who cannot hack it on his hardwood. Wins count more with alumni fans — and, therefore, with university administrators — than degrees.
Steve Horton, assistant USF athletic director for compliance, said it is a challenge to field a basketball team that is competitive in the classroom as well as in the paint. "You can hit two good years in a row," Horton said. "Man, these were great kids. They went to class. They studied hard. And they couldn't hit the outside shot. They stunk on the court. But they were good kids and they graduated." Holding up a copy of a NCAA graduation report, Horton continued: "Well, it looks good here. But the coach isn't here anymore because he went 4-23 two years in a row."
John Feinstein, author of a recently published book called The Last Amateurs: Playing for Glory and Honor in Division I College Basketball, told the Weekly Planet: "Most colleges that are playing on a big-time level have sold their souls to the devil in order to win basketball games." For his book, Feinstein spent a refreshing hoop season around the proudly small-time Patriot League, where athletic scholarships are virtually unknown. Players for Bucknell or Lehigh universities carry serious class loads with little tutoring. Nearly all make it to Commencement Day in cap and gown.
Feinstein believes the recent academic fraud at the University of Minnesota is more typical of today's college game. Last October, the NCAA placed Minnesota on probation for four years and cut scholarships and campus visits for recruits. Former tutor Jan Gangelhoff completed about 400 class assignments for 18 or more basketball players between 1994 and 1998 with the consent of former coach Clem Haskins, who paid her $3,000.
The latest four-year national Division I graduation rate for basketball players was around 42 percent. "That includes the Ivy and the Patriot leagues, which graduate almost 100 percent of their players," said Feinstein. "That includes the free summer school, all the tutoring, the guidance to classes with sympathetic professors that you see at many schools, not to mention academic fraud, which, unlike at Minnesota, is hardly ever detected. You have all that and they still cannot do better than 42 percent."
USF spent $30,456 on tutors for student-athletes during the 1999-2000 academic year. The basketball tutors cost $1,922, said Associate General Counsel Olga J. Joanow.
Basketball and football players who graduate should be the rule rather than an anomaly celebrated by athletic departments. That was the argument of Charles Reed, former chancellor of Florida's public university system. "They're given a lot more opportunities, services and attention than the rest of the student body," Reed told the Tribune in 1996. "Which means something has failed if the student does not graduate. The university, the athletic department, the coaches all failed."
Such expectations are wildly unrealistic, according to athletic directors.
Horton said his school's graduation figures for basketball should be viewed in context. "You have to look at what kind of institution it is," said Horton, who arrived at USF in 1998. "People will say: "You're not graduating 50 percent of your students?' I would not expect a school the size of USF, where it's located and how the kids go to school, to graduate much above 50 percent." (With half its enrollment part-time students, the USF graduation rate for the entire 1993 freshman class was 47 percent.)
Large public universities graduate fewer students than small private ones, said Horton. That, he said, usually goes for student-athletes, too. According to the latest NCAA statistics, 33 percent of basketball players at public institutions graduated compared with 59 percent at private ones.
"A lot of private schools have the opportunity and the wherewithal to give you the support system so that you are going to graduate," said Horton. "I have a whole different set of problems than a Marquette does." Marquette University graduated 63 percent of basketball players in the latest NCAA survey, behind only Tulane University's 67 percent in Conference USA.
Yet The Oracle, USF's student newspaper, reported last November that 56 percent of the school's 370 student-athletes finished the 1999-2000 spring semester with a grade-point-average of 3.0 or better, the highest in athletic department history. Men's basketball wasn't broken out, but women appear to have shored up the department's overall showing. For the 1999-2000 academic year, USF won three awards for sports teams that registered the highest collective GPAs in the conference. All three were women's teams.
The Planet asked USF officials for data that might show how Greenberg recruits have done with their studies so far. USF lawyers and athletic directors didn't respond and neither did Greenberg.
Jack Wheat, spokesman for university President Judy Genshaft, said the limitations of the NCAA data distort the graduation picture for USF athletes. Wheat said the NCAA didn't report that 50 percent of the basketball players who transferred to USF in 1993 graduated. (The report does show a 44 percent graduation rate for players who transferred to USF from 1990 through 1993.)
"This is a particularly significant omission for the University of South Florida, of course, because we have the largest number of transfer students in the country," Wheat said. "The NCAA statistics also do not track the athletes who began at USF and completed their degrees at other schools.
"And, frankly, it sort of stands to reason that if you bring in some talented transfer students to play, some of the players whom you recruited as freshmen are going to find their playing opportunities diminished and they'll transfer to other schools."
Since most college basketball coaches can offer only 13 full scholarships, the small number magnifies the ups and the downs of a school's graduation rate from one year to the next. "When you're dealing with ones and twos and threes and fours, the percentages look different than if you just look at the raw numbers," Wheat said.
Some public universities maintain well-rounded intercollegiate athletic programs despite funding and other handicaps. The Sporting News recently looked at 115 universities with Division I basketball and Division I-A football teams to determine which schools had the best combination of win-loss record, graduation rate, fan support, gender equity in sports funding, and adherence to NCAA rules. USF was excluded because it won't play a full Division I-A schedule till this fall. Of the top five universities, three were state-assisted: Michigan State, North Carolina and Purdue.
USF requires all freshmen athletes, including basketball players, to attend daily study hall. They are joined by any upperclassmen whose GPA has dipped below 2.3. Since the NCAA bans from competition those who cannot keep a minimum 2.0 during their junior and senior years, USF's policy gives the school a chance to deal with athletes who are struggling academically before they are banished to the sidelines.
Class attendance is checked by Phyllis LaBaw, assistant athletic director for academic support. English Professor Nancy J. Tyson, who has taught student-athletes, said she received a schedule of a player's practices and games during the first week of the term. Conflicts with her classes were noted, Tyson said. If an athlete missed any other classes, Tyson said she was encouraged to notify the athletic department.
"That showed me something," said Tyson, president of the USF Faculty Senate. At a previous academic posting, Ohio State athletic officials were indifferent about player attendance at course lectures, Tyson said. At USF, she said: "At least they want to know when a player cuts class."
LaBaw also conducts study hall on road trips. In January, LaBaw traveled with Bull basketball players who missed a week of classes for games at Marquette and the University of California.
Basketball is one of the hardest sports on a class schedule. "A lot of times, there are games in the middle of the week," said Randy E. Miller, a USF journalism professor. "It takes some discipline to stay up." Miller knows the struggle firsthand. He said he followed his college team as a student-reporter and had to cover away games.
Horton said football players seldom have to miss class, even for a Saturday road game. "In all honesty, football is probably the easiest," said Horton. "They leave Friday at noon and everybody is done with classes."
Unimpressed were USF professors, who tried and failed to keep football from becoming a varsity sport. Two-thirds of them voted against establishment of a football program in 1992. "We thought academics would suffer," said Tyson, who concluded that "money" trumped the faculty.
Other academics have found that high-pressure college athletics spell classroom woes for basketball and football players, including blacks heavily represented in those big-revenue sports.
"The concentration of African-Americans in sports where the athletic-academic tension is greatest is … troubling," Ohio State researchers Tanya R. Upthegrove and Vincent J. Roscigno and the University of Pennsylvania's Camille Zubrinsky Charles wrote in Social Science Quarterly two years ago. "Participation in revenue-generating and commercialized programs may have the effect of at least partially reproducing inequalities that these students bring to college. These students are placed in a contradictory position — one in which decisions regarding athletic and academic commitment seem at odds. Coupled with more general background disadvantages, African-American athletes in revenue-generating sports are left in a precarious position."
Nevertheless, the majority of basketball players who did manage to graduate from USF during the years covered by the latest NCAA report were black. Among them was Jesse Salters, a star at Tampa's Chamberlain High School who captained the Bulls for three seasons and became USF's seventh-highest scorer of all time. While accepting a speech-communication degree in December of his final season, Salters was named "most outstanding senior" in a graduating class of 4,000.
Salters doesn't show up in the 17 percent graduation rate because he transferred from Florida State. Vince Hyatt, the elementary-education major from that USF basketball era, also wasn't counted as a graduate because he played at a Fort Myers junior college before coming to Fowler Avenue.
Earlier a top student-athlete at Edison Community College, Hyatt said he got no breaks from USF professors while balancing sports and studies. "I was definitely not treated any differently," said Hyatt, relaxing at his Carrollwood duplex on a recent evening. "I was treated just the same as the other students. So I had to work twice as hard."
Hyatt, 28, is a teacher himself today in the Hillsborough County public schools. In order to get his USF degree, Hyatt put in grueling days during basketball season. Up for a 6 a.m. cafeteria breakfast, Hyatt was out to a local elementary school for his internship by 7:15. Three hours later, he was back on campus for classes until 3. Basketball practice followed for three more hours. Then, it was dinner and studying till midnight.
"There were nights I was calling home, telling Mom I was coming home," said Hyatt. His 6-foot-6 frame folded onto a living-room sofa, Hyatt smiles at the memory while bouncing his own young son on a knee. "Basically, she was telling me: "I'm not letting you come home. You need to get this education while it's free.'"
Thinking back, Hyatt believes he may have been the only community college transfer to join the Bulls in 1992 and graduate on time two years later. While Hyatt studied well, his USF teams were a lackluster 18-36 over two seasons.
Only point guard Chucky Atkins has made it to the National Basketball Association from those teams. Atkins went undrafted and had to play in places like Croatia for three years. Last summer, after being traded from the Orlando Magic, Atkins signed an $8-million deal with the Detroit Pistons, partially guaranteed over four seasons. Atkins had his USF jersey number retired at the Sun Dome last month, though he has yet to graduate. Atkins, who finished his Bulls career in 1996, is close to getting a degree, Horton said.
Other teammates from the 1990 through 1993 recruitment period also bailed out of USF after exhausting their athletic eligibility and signed with pro teams in Europe and elsewhere.
"Once their eligibility is up, they have a choice: finish however many classes I have or go overseas right now and pick up $100,000," said Hyatt, who believes the latter option explains much of the poor graduation rate for the USF recruiting classes of the early 1990s.
Hyatt progressed from gangly prep center, mostly hauling down boards at Moore Haven High School, to a versatile defensive specialist when he finished at USF. He and Greg Summers, another transfer to USF who graduated, teamed up to cover hot scorers. "We would always guard the toughest guys. We had to guard Bobby Sura from Florida State," said Hyatt, referring to an ex-Seminole shooter now with the NBA's Golden State Warriors. "We held him to, like, nine points. He came here to Tampa averaging, maybe, 28. Greg and I, we split the time on him. Basically, we didn't let him get the ball."
But European scouts want to see big scoring stats in the Street & Smith's college record books.
Hyatt said his single-digit USF basketball points-per-game average hurt when he left teaching briefly in 1996 to audition at an Austrian tournament with Summers. "This was two years after I had graduated from USF and I was in the best shape of my life. I had a better three-point shot than when I was at South Florida," said Hyatt. "I was in the zone in the championship game. I had at least 40 points. Greg had at least 30."
Their hot hands in Vienna couldn't overcome their college numbers in Tampa. "That wasn't good enough," said Hyatt. "I saw the coaches holding up the Street & Smith's books. That's all they lived by."
Even a $100,000-a-year European basketball contract looks pretty good to an American schoolteacher. "I work three or four years to get that," said Hyatt.
Hyatt would love to make more money. He tried sales at Tech Data Corp. but returned to teaching. "Being an educator, there's not another job like it," said Hyatt. "Having your kids come back to you, especially with my first group graduating from high school this year, that's just a good feeling."
If any of them aspire to college basketball, their old teacher would have no regrets advising them to put as much energy into studying as dribbling: "You have the thought in the back of your mind. "Hey, if I don't get this degree, what else am I going to do?' Here I am, this big 6-foot-6 guy. You've got to be able to do something."
Unlike a pro contract, Hyatt said, a college degree allows the recipient the luxury of always being able to say: "I have it now and you cannot take it."
Research assistance by Nigel Pinnock.
Contact Staff Writer Francis X. Gilpin at 813-248-8888, ext. 130, or frangilpin@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2001.