College Basketball

The other March Madness

March Madness is over, and the UConn Huskies came home with the title for both men’s and women’s basketball.

The other madness continues. This is the story of colleges and universities that operate as professional sports franchises rather than institutions of higher learning.

Look at UConn: The Huskies men’s team entered this competition with the lowest graduation rate: 8 percent. (In sharp contrast, the Lady Huskies graduate nine out of 10 players). So bad was the men’s Huskies’ academic performance, last year they were banned from the NCAA tournament.

Coach Kevin Ollie says the new numbers will show the program has made excellent progress. That’s good news, and it mirrors the record 65 percent graduation rate for African-American players among the 64 teams in the Division 1 tournament. Even so, the NCAA bar remains far too low: A school might have half its athletes not graduating and still remain eligible.

We don’t mean to pick on UConn. And on the flip side, there are programs — e.g., Duke, Villanova, Kansas — whose basketball teams boast high graduation rates. But the larger point remains: We have a system in which colleges and universities make millions off students who will never make it to the pros or earn a college degree.

That’s why you have all these crazy lawsuits seeking to unionize players, help them cash in on the NCAA riches and so on. These are not the answer. But the efforts will keep coming so long as our universities allow themselves to serve as de facto farm clubs for the NBA and the NFL.