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player ready...NCAA officials are talking about adopting a new system in which colleges will be penalized for athletes who don’t graduate and be rewarded for those who do.
Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight calls this a smokescreen.
“I said 25 years ago that if presidents are really concerned about NCAA eligibility, that they would only give scholarships to replace kids who have graduated,” Knight said.
“I think college presidents are just simply afraid at how teams would be decimated,” he said. “They’ve done such a poor job with it. I’ve been a head coach in college basketball now for 39 years and at three different institutions. We’ve had three kids in that period of time who were seniors who had completed their eligibility who don’t have a degree. And two of them have enough hours.
“If I can do it by demanding that kids go to class, any coach in America can do exactly the same thing.
“And we don’t need a lot of smokescreen to cover what we ought to be doing as our primary responsibility, and that’s seeing that kids get an education.”
Knight also is against an NCAA plan that would allow every athlete five years of eligibility rather than the current four in five years.
“I think it’s a real mistake,” he said. “I think five years of eligibility, among other things, we’ll see a lot more kids transfer. They come in for a year, they know they can leave and still play three years under the existing five-year rule. Some of the rules that we have now would have to be changed to six years.”