Wiedmer: Education woes with athletes start long before college

Rick Barnes
Rick Barnes
photo Rick Barnes

Whether intentional or not, the irony couldn't be ignored. Placed side by side near the top of this newspaper's website Wednesday afternoon were the following stories:

A) Report: Academic misconduct occurred at Texas under Rick Barnes.

B) Cook: 13 solutions to the problem that is public schools.

First things first. Before the Big Orange Nation gets all apoplectic over the possibility that the NCAA could put the kibosh on new Tennessee basketball coach Barnes for academic wrongs allegedly committed at his other UT gig, let's remember that an accusation is not a finding of guilt.

And even if it's proven that NCAA violations did take place during his time in Texas, if North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams can seemingly avoid direct tarring despite 18 years of academic chicanery in Baby Bluesville, it's almost unfathomable that anything Barnes did short of writing his players' papers, taking their tests, then holding the professor at gunpoint until his Longhorns were given a B+ could earn him any NCAA penalty worse than writing "I will do better" 100 times on a greaseboard.

Beyond that, however excellent David Cook's two-part series on one public school teacher's observations about all that's wrong with Chattanooga public education, it has no direct link to a major college basketball program nearly 950 driving miles to the southwest.

Yet Cook's two-parter does speak, if not SCREAM, to the notion that one very big reason universities may be at least tempted to look the other way when their athletes cheat in order to remain eligible is because they're so ill-prepared to do college work when they arrive on campus.

For proof, merely consider former Texas player J'Covan Brown, whose work was questioned more than once in the Chronicle of Higher Education report about supposed academic irregularities in the Longhorns basketball program while Barnes was coach.

Wrote Brown to the Chronicle: "I took kare of wat I had to in the classroom on my own. Everything else u talk about I dnt kno anything about."

At least he used "anything" instead of "nothin'."

But if it's somehow proven that Barnes knew more than Texas is claiming he did - in a Wednesday release it said that it does not believe that Barnes either knew of or was involved in any academic improprieties - at least Tennessee athletic director Dave Hart can say the search firm of Collegiate Sports Associates didn't inform him of anything he needed to be concerned about with Barnes.

That's almost assuredly why UT paid that search firm $51,000 - or $12,750 a day for the four days the Vols were without a coach between the firing of Donnie Tyndall and the hiring of Barnes - since Hart was apparently focused on Barnes before Tyndall could clean out his office.

So unlike Tyndall's NCAA issues at Southern Miss - which Hart can't blame a lack of knowledge of on anyone else, since he didn't retain a search firm before that hire - he can claim it was all CSA's fault if he must also let go of Barnes.

Yet this is also where the NCAA should pay as much attention to Cook's back-to-back column gems on our broken public education system here in Chattanooga as to whatever did or didn't happen at Texas.

After all, the academic morass in this country starts long before college. Today's athletes in football and men's basketball aren't unprepared for college because it's too hard. In most cases they're unprepared because the 12 years they spent in underperforming elementary, middle and high schools did nothing more than get them eligible for an athletic scholarship.

Or as the unidentified teacher told Cook on Tuesday: "Student attitudes are getting worse. I have never seen such a degree of cheating. Many work harder at cheating than they actually do on the assignment itself."

As was stated in both of Cook's columns, parents deserve much of the blame. Either they don't care about their children's education or don't comprehend how much their interest is needed to develop a good student.

And if we continue to insist that our largest public universities field highly competitive athletic teams, it may also be time to re-evaluate what we ask of those athletes as college students - at least until our weakest public secondary schools can properly prepare their students for college work.

A little over a year ago, The Sporting News' Mike DeCourcy argued that athletes should be allowed to major in their sport. Especially those unprepared for normal college work. They could spend the majority of their time on their sport, but also improve their basic academic skills to the point they could do legitimate college work down the road.

Said B. David Ridpath, an associate professor at Ohio University, when DeCourcy told him of this idea: "How much worse is it going to be than what they're doing now? In many cases, we're not educating them now. It would probably be a better education than they're getting."

Indeed, as is once more confirmed by the Chronicle of Higher Education's exposé on Texas athletes getting grades they didn't earn for papers they probably didn't write, how much worse can the current system be?

That doesn't mean UT-Knoxville basketball fans should have no concern about what allegedly happened under Barnes' watch at UT-Austin. Especially since the report also stated Texas basketball once had one of the five worst Academic Progress Rate scores among 350 Division I schools earlier in Barnes' 17-year tenure there.

But it does mean that all levels of education - be it our public schools in the Chattanooga area or the athletic departments at North Carolina and Texas, to name but two colleges - need a complete overhaul, because in far, far too many cases, we're nowhere close to taking "kare" of "wat" we need to do to properly educate our young people.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.

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