The Billiken's Bluff

The March 14th issue of Time magazine featured an article about the abysmal graduation rates among student-athletes at universities with top-tier athletic programs. The article, titled "Getting Benched", was pretty standard fare, nothing ground-breaking. Apparently UConn has lower standards for it's basketball players than for it's regular students (so does Duke, UNC, Harvard, even NYU).

The article pointed the finger at a couple of programs, Kentucky and Texas, but focused mainly on UConn, probably because they were last year's NCAA Basketball champions and thus ripe for the picking. The article claimed that the UConn program has a particularly poor academic track-record for it's basketball players, the article states:

"Just 27% graduated the past few years".

Since this was a featured article, Time placed a picture next to the story in the table of contents. The pictured shows a UConn player, probably the best player from those past few years mentioned above. The caption reads:

"College athletes may be able to dunk, but in class they flunk."

(Clever stuff Time, your caption even rhymes... look at me I'm a poet... and I don't even know it!). The picture alongside the caption shows a UConn player doing just that... dunking.



This picture and the caption make sense at first glance. The player is in fact dunking, and he is wearing a UConn jersey. The only problem is that the picture shows Emeka Okafor!!! Who was an Academic All-American!!! Who graduated in 3 years with a degree in Finance!!! Who played basketball, was named National Player of the Year, and maintained a 3.8 G.P.A.!!! All while leaping tall buildings in a single bound!!! He dunked many a time, but not once did he flunk!!!

I know all this because Rico is a UConn groupie. We watched UConn win the NCAA tournament last spring and Rico was always quick to wax poetic about Okafor’s exploits both on the court and off.

But even the amateur blogger or casual sports fan would know that Emeka is not the man to feature in an article about academic inadequacy. Dick Vitale, Bill Raftery, and any and every announcer who covered March Madness last spring made sure to mention the little factoid that Emeka Okafor was National Player of the Year AND an Academic All-American. The perfect combination of performance on the court, and in the classroom. The prototypical student-athlete.



Here is a portion of Okafor's bio from Answers.com:

Okafor, the son of Nigerian immigrants, is known for not only being a good basketball player but also for achieving success in academics. His major at UConn was finance, and he graduated with honors after three years in May 2004 with a 3.8 GPA. One of his last courses at UConn was an honors-level finance course where students were allowed to make investment decisions for a small portion of UConn's endowment. Okafor was named the Academic All-American of the Year in 2004 for his work off the court.

I was tempted to write a letter to Time just to let them know that I know, that they have no clue what's going on and so on. But instead, I’m content to put this little post together.

Take that Time, you just got served in the Blogosphere.