Current headlines show depth of college hoops' woes
INDIANAPOLIS -- For years, American youth basketball has been trying to scrub clean its greasy underbelly.
At the game's current purification rate, though, Joakim Noah's ponytail will be gray before basketball has significantly reduced its oiliness.
These are your pertinent story lines of the week in the sport, as recruiting season hits high gear here at the Nike All-America Camp and elsewhere:
• An NCAA list of high schools and prep schools that are under scrutiny for suspiciously miraculous academic transformations includes some of the biggest names in basketball -- most notably Oak Hill Academy (Va.), Laurinburg (N.C.) Institute, Mt. Zion Academy (N.C.), Notre Dame Prep (Mass.), St. Thomas More Prep (Conn.) and The Patterson School (N.C.). With those schools' NCAA certification status up in the air, a number of high-profile players could be affected.
• DeLoss Dodds, who as the Texas athletic director heads one of the pre-eminent athletic empires in the country, declared college basketball "a horrible business" to The Dallas Morning News.
• Sonny Vaccaro, the original shoe titan and a self-acknowledged part of what's wrong with the game, is flexing more muscle than ever, now with Reebok. The latest: Players from Vaccaro's Reebok stable could be flocking to Sonny's Los Angeles backyard, apparently for star-making purposes.
Class of 2007 star O.J. Mayo, from Cincinnati, reportedly has made a surprising oral commitment to Southern California (an arrangement that, if consummated, won't last longer than the Trojans' final dribble of the 2007-08 season). Class of 2009 star Renardo Sidney -- whose father, a former school security guard, is now a paid Reebok "consultant" -- has moved from Mississippi to L.A., according to several media reports.
That should be enough to wilt your pompom right there. A troubled sport isn't getting any healthier at the moment.
Problem is, the genie is so far out of the bottle that there's no conceivable means of forcing him back in. The genie has set up shop on campus -- and probably has his own office a few doors down from the head coach.
Every solution only creates a new set of unforeseen problems, and every new rule is countered by a new scam.
The shoe influence isn't going away. The NBA dollar signs in the kids' eyes aren't going away. The human barnicles who attach themselves to the kids aren't going away. And the lack of interest in (and emphasis on) academics -- in high school or college -- isn't going away.
At least the NCAA took a step toward addressing the latest academic scam: bogus prep schools that clean up three years of lousy transcripts with a one-year makeover, allowing players to gain college eligibility. For too many basketball players, high school has become a vagabond process -- bouncing from one school to the next, until finishing at a prep school that magically fixes a player's academic deficiencies.
Of course, the very fact the NCAA Clearinghouse was rubber-stamping all manner of garbage diploma mills necessitated the corrective action. Now those who wound up on what everyone at the Nike camp is calling the "banned list" are squawking.
Powerhouse programs like Oak Hill and the others listed above have had their 2006 graduates cleared to begin the initial eligibility process, but the NCAA has said the schools' academics are "subject to further review."
"Obviously, I was shocked, surprised, to be listed with some of those other schools," Oak Hill coach Steve Smith said. "I was a little disturbed when I saw it. They never visited our school, never called us. Our door's open, baby. Come down and visit, we don't have anything to hide.
"We've been there 128 years. I've been there 21 years as head coach. We've never had any problems with the NCAA."
Smith said Oak Hill's president called the NCAA Thursday to get an explanation. Kevin Lennon, NCAA vice president for membership services, said his institution hardly apologized for Oak Hill's inclusion on its list.
"We've laid out to the [Oak Hill] principal the exact reasons they're on the list," Lennon said. "I think there's a little bit of an understanding why we might be concerned."
Speaking generally, Lennon said the NCAA identified schools that took in large numbers of transfers and/or fifth-year students, and schools where athletes made major jumps in the number of core courses passed or a big rise in grade-point average.
"If you had a 1.0 GPA for three years and failed all your math classes," Lennon said, "we want to know how you then got a 4.0 and three years of math credits in one year."
The most publicized prep school on the list is Philadelphia Lutheran Christian -- the kind of school Smith so strenuously objected to being linked with. That storefront school was outed for its sketchy academics by The Washington Post and The New York Times this past winter.
Many coaches at Nike wondered how Lutheran Christian avoided being immediately banned by the NCAA. Lennon said that the review process is continuing for that school -- and that its "graduates" have hardly been green-lighted to play in 2006-07.
"Some of the students who attended there might get their records reviewed [by the NCAA Clearinghouse]," Lennon said.
The NCAA's other hope is that its member schools will stop using the Clearinghouse eligibility standard as their own. In other words, just because the NCAA screwed up in allowing schools like Lutheran Christian to proliferate, it doesn't mean the schools have to look the other way and admit its players.
"That should not be a de facto admissions standard," Lennon said.
It might be asking too much for athletic programs, though, to suddenly show some restraint when the star power forward shows up with a transcript that looks like a ransom note. It also might be asking too much to believe that college basketball will ever mount a significant and successful reform movement. The genie has grown way too big for his bottle.
Pat Forde is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPN4D@aol.com.
