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More Lightning and Less Thunder The Challenge for NCAA Athletics Bernard Franklin* I. Introduction A t the height of the Civil War, when the North was suffering numerous defeats on the battlefield , President Lincoln met with a few members of Congress, who at that time were extremely critical of his leadership.1 After listening attentively to their concerns and observations , President Lincoln began his response to these disgruntled politicians by telling them the story of a farmer who traveled to town in order to purchase supplies and, upon his return later that night, encountered a torrential rain storm, complete with ample doses of lightning and thunder.2 The storm was bad, and the thickness of darkness was so great that the farmer became disoriented. When he came upon the river that he had to cross in order to get home, he could not locate the bridge. It was dark, there was a torrential downpour of rain, and there was thunder and lightning. But with every flash of lightning, there was some, albeit momentary, illumination at which time the farmer could survey his surroundings and thereby determine his location. As he stood there in the midst of this precarious predicament, he thought to himself that what he needed was more lightning and less thunder.3 The underlying message in President Lincoln’s story is that in the midst of confronting critical challenges, what is often needed is more lightning and less thunder.4 Lightning illuminates, while thunder only creates noise. What does Abraham Lincoln’s story have to do with the current state of college sports? More often than not, when attempts are made to describe the current landscape of collegiate athletics, the focus is on the thunder. In other words, the focus is on what is wrong with the intercollegiate athletic enterprise instead of a more balanced perspective, where there is also attention given to the lightning, or the more illuminative aspects of college sports. Thus, my challenge here is to describe the landscape of college sports with equal attention to both the lightning and the thunder. I want 17 More Lightning and Less Thunder: The Challenge for NCAA Athletics to focus on three areas: (1) academic reform, (2) commercialism, and (3) the ability to manage and leverage diversity within collegiate athletics. II. Academic Reform More than five years ago, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA or Association) embarked on a journey of academic reform.5 Six years ago, the graduation rate of Division I studentathletes was 58 percent,6 two percentage points better than the general student body.7 Football players were graduating at a rate of 49 percent8 and male basketball players, at a rate of 40 percent.9 Five years later, student-athletes are graduating at a rate of 63 percent,10 which is five percentage points better than five years ago. That represents significant progress. Actually, the reality is far better. The reported numbers above result from using the federal methodology for calculating graduation. This methodology is now recognized as a flawed approach.11 The current federal approach is to take a snapshot of the time when students first enter a university and then six years later take another snapshot to see who graduated from the same institution.12 This approach is inaccurate because it fails to track transfer students.13 As many as one-third of all students, and more at some public institutions, transfer at least once during their academic careers and still earn degrees.14 When we started tracking student-athletes who transferred, we discovered that in Division I alone, more than 30,000 student-athletes were not counted by the federal government each year.15 Thus, we created a more accurate metric: the Graduation Success Rate (GSR).16 The latest NCAA Division I data show that 86 percent of female and 70 percent of male student-athletes have graduated.17 If you include four years of graduation success rate data in Division I, football is 67 percent18 and men’s basketball is 61 percent.19 The latest data for African American male basketball players show that these student-athletes graduate at a higher rate than African American males in the general student body.20 We also have a new and better management tool for presidents and directors of athletics. We call it the Academic Progress Rate, or APR.21 The APR is a better tool because it enables us to understand how a sports team is doing while student-athletes are still...

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