Graduating seniors, esteemed faculty, family and friends of the UConn community – I’m so happy to be back with you all here in Storrs today. Even though I last played for Coach Auriemma thirteen years ago, my experiences here at the University of Connecticut continue to be the best of my life. I’ll always be proud of how much I accomplished here, and will be eternally grateful for everything it learned during my college career.
Which is why I’m truly honored to address the graduating class this year. I hope that all of you graduating seniors have made memories here in that you hold just as dear, and that you have dreams just as big for what you will do when you leave here today. But I also hope and pray that someone in this audience will save me from the hell I’ve been living since I left.
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Theme music for this morning’s quick post, as we prepare for another ill-advised road trip:
The Sheldon Williams uni makes this college basketball-related. High octane in the blazin’ sun.
THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT More Schools That Couldn’t Fake Academic Achievement
Buzz around the interwebs continues to center on the APR ratings released yesterday. Rush the Court broke down the numbers in much greater detail than us, with some interesting findings:
1) Davidson had the best overall APR (a perfect 1000) amongst hoops programs, while Carolina had the highest amongst BCS programs. There is a safety school joke in here somewhere, but damned if we can find it.
2) The total list of teams suffering scholarship losses: Kansas State, Purdue, Seton Hall, South Carolina, Tennessee, and New Mexico State take a hit of one scholly apiece, while Southern Cal and UAB will lose two apiece for their historic incompetence.
3) The ACC and the Big East had the highest conference APR averages. If that isn’t evidence of the worthiness of the APR as a measure of academic success, we’re not sure what is. (That, or Big Ten programs are even worse at finding decent educations for their players than we already suspect.)
Fitting news for the day that we licked the stamp on the final exam of our academic career: the NCAA ratted out the college basketball programs with the same approach to academics as us. Forty-six Division I basketball programs failed to achieve a passing APR score 925 (because that’s a passing score that makes sense, no matter what the scale).
Many are only subject to a “public notice” penalty, which from all we can tell is somewhere between a few days in the stockades and the online equivalent of a wagging finger. Stephen Colbert approves.
But for a dozen or so schools, including a handful of teams from this year’s NCAA tournament, headlined by Tennessee, their low APR score means they will lose scholarships. The Vols will lose one free ride, which is convenient since they just booted two scholarship players from the team. No word on the other offenders. (We meant the other schools, but you didn’t know for a second there, did ya? Go Vols!)
Proudly, none of the institutions we have attended landed on the big list of fail – but for those that did, we offer the following as a public service announcement:
And people say the Honor Code isn’t relevant today.
