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Super Star
There's a lot to consider as you feverishly fill out your brackets in preparation for the kickoff of March Madness Thursday. Who plays the best defense? What team can crash the glass and pull down the offensive rebounds, creating the best second chance opportunities? Who will keep their composure best under pressure and who is going to wilt like three week old roses?
Everyone has their own favorite theories about what teams are most worthy of winning a National Championship in men's basketball this year. The field is certainly wide open, as neither team that played in the championship game last season is even present in the tournament this year. Both Ohio State and Florida, the two-time defending champs, have been banished to NIT-Land, the NCAA version of being sent to Siberia in the Cold War era USSR.
But there's only one team in this year's field of 65 that is perfect, and that's the team that would win it in a perfect world. I know, I know, Memphis came closest to going undefeated this season, but even the top-seeded Tigers lost one game.
No, I'm not talking about success or failure on the court, I'm referring to the reason these kids are supposed to be going to school in the first place, and that's to get an education. According to a study conducted by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, only one school in this year's field of 65 achieved a 100% success rate in graduating its' basketball players - Western Kentucky.
The study, which examined four freshman classes for the periods beginning in 1997-98 and running through 2000-01, showed Western Kentucky at 100%, followed by Butler (92%), Notre Dame, Purdue and Davidson (all at 91%), and Xavier (90%).
The thing that jumps out at you when you look at these numbers and the schools that posted them - the elephant in the the room if you will - is that none of them are top-seeds. In fact, the highest-seeded team out of the schools graduating the most players is Xavier, at #3 in the West.
Out of the four top seeds, only North Carolina has anything approaching a decent graduation rate; theirs was 86%. Kansas fails at 45%, and UCLA and Memphis are equally abysmal, graduating only 40% of their players over the period of the study. The University of Memphis, whose motto is "Dreamers. Thinkers. Doers," apparently doesn't apply that to their basketball program, in whose honor they should perhaps add, "Failures."
Some schools dispute the numbers in the study, and according to an Associated Press story, UCLA claims to have achieved a better success rate recently and that a better indicator of their progress in graduating players is the NCAA's new Academic Progress Rate. The fourth year of data using those numbers will be available this spring, and the head of the study says the numbers will be updated then.
In the meantime, though, the tournament favorites might be Memphis, UNC, UCLA and Kansas, but MY favorites will be the teams with a better handle on their priorities: Western Kentucky, Notre Dame, Purdue and Davidson.