St. Louis Globe-Democrat

Before moving back to St. Louis in early 1995, I had spent my last year in Washington, D.C. as senior editor of Emerge magazine.

Created in New York in 1991, Emerge was later purchased by Black Entertainment Television as part of a new magazine group that included a black youth magazine called “YSB.” The offices were moved from New York to D.C.

It was the nation’s only monthly magazine devoted to serious African-American news issues; it was not about rap or any other kind of music. You had to look elsewhere for lifestyles, relationships, hair talk or the NBA. It was a serious news magazine.

The key word in that prior sentence is “was.”

BET was owned by its creator Bob Johnson, and he invested in the magazines. Like any news magazine, we struggled early, but had an acceptable loss of $100,000 during the two years I worked there.

However, Johnson was used to raking in the cash by underpaying his BET employees and airing hour after hour of trash on that network. He didn’t have time for serious journalism or journalists, plus he did nothing to market the magazine nationally.

In October 1994, he told us that he would live with the magazine’s debt, but we should not expect a raise or change in benefits for at least five years.

Did I mention the man was almost worth $1 billion at that time? Well, that meeting slapped some sense into me and I moved a few months later.

Johnson would later sell BET to Viacom, making him one of America’s richest businesspersons. Emerge died a quiet death.

Billionaire Bob would later buy the NBA’s Charlotte franchise – and name it the Bobcats in honor of himself. He soon was bored with that and has now arranged to sell the majority stake in the team to Michael Jordan.

You can tell I’m still bitter about how all that went down, but I’m proud of some of the things we accomplished.

Topping that list was a feature based on graduation rates of NCAA players that former St. Louisan Jimmie Briggs and I wrote in 1993.

The only way to complete that first list was to get the NCAA’s four-inch thick book of graduation rates for each school – and sport – and go through team-by-team. It was painstaking, but it was worth it.

We really had no idea what we would find. Our guess was that it would show that many athletes did not graduate from college.

We were correct in that assumption. We were also able to break down the black athlete graduation rate, the rates of major colleges compared to smaller schools and more.

Each year, Emerge did Division 1 football, men’s and women’s college basketball and men’s and women’s track and field.

We were the first to interview Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, which now releases an annual study examining the graduation rates of basketball and football players.

We called coaches to ask them about their sorry graduation rates and got phones slammed down on us and called “troublemakers.”

We contacted schools that graduated some black players and no white players. Those coaches were just as irate as some of the others because we had the nerve to even bring up graduation rates.

It was our story, the kind we envisioned Emerge breaking throughout the years. But that never happened. However, that story caught national attention and is now part of the respective college football and basketball seasons each year.

The trends from the early 1990s remain the same. The graduation rate for athletes in this year’s study was at 64 percent – slightly higher than the previous year.

Before you scoff at that 64 percent, it is higher than the average graduation rate for all students in major colleges, which is about 62 percent according to a report by the American Enterprise Institute.

Here are some other findings from the 2010 study authored by Lapchick, focusing on the field of 65 teams that qualified for the NCAA Tournament.

The real winners are the players from BYU, Marquette, Notre Dame, Utah State, Wake Forest, Wofford, Duke, Lehigh, Vermont and Villanova. These schools all had graduation rates of more than 90 percent.

Of the tournament’s top seeds, Duke is also No. 1 with a 92 percent graduation rate. Kansas is at 73 percent, Syracuse at 55 percent and Kentucky at 31 percent.

Of the schools in the tournament, 44 graduated at least 50 percent of their players and 29 teams graduated at least 70 percent.

If you come in at less than half, I think you should be concerned.

Twelve teams graduated less than 40 percent of their players. The University of Maryland graduated just 8 percent of its student players. California-Berkeley, one of the nation’s finest schools, should be embarrassed by its 20 percent graduation rate.

By the way, one of the things that Briggs and I learned when laboring through our compilation was that the statistics provided by the NCAA cover six years. The latest study includes players that began college between 1999 and 2002. The last year from which graduation statistics are included in the current study is 2007-08.

The institute used NCAA statistics and studied how many athletes who started college between 1999 and 2002 had graduated within six years. It did not include data from 2008-09.

Maryland coach Gary Williams told the Washington Post that basing the current study on the old data is not fair.

“We’ll graduate all four of our seniors this year. Our academic support system has completely changed since 1999-2003. That is ancient facts,” he said.

Like many coaches of major programs, he also spoke of players leaving school early and making millions of dollars in the NBA. I can accept that, but in my mind it has nothing to do with the real story because very few athletes actually leave school early and then become successful pro athletes.

Briggs and I were admittedly trying to investigate black graduation rates when we stumbled on the fact that ALL graduation rates for Division 1 NCAA teams were suspect. This year’s study does conclude that 84 percent of white and 56 percent of African American Division I players graduated.

Forty-five teams in the NCAA Tournament graduated more than 70 percent of their white players; just 20 teams graduated more than 70 percent of African American players. Last year’s study showed a 26-percent difference. It is not up to 48 percent.

Calling it “one of higher education’s greatest failures,” Lapchick said this gap is a campus-wide problem.

“The gaps continue to widen, even though the actual graduation rates of African‐American basketball student‐athletes are increasing."

On Wednesday night, Lapchick, NAACP President Ben Jealous on Education Department representatives held a conference call with the media to discuss ways to increase graduation rates. One suggestion is to hold schools accountable for graduating players by putting an NCAA bid or bowl game invitation on the line. Missing a graduation mark could mean missing millions of dollars in revenue.

However, this seems unfair because – once again – athletes in total graduate at a higher level than the overall student population. Regardless of racial implications, it seems like athletic programs are being picked for selective prosecution.

It’s a poor use of words, but “blacklisting” a team is not the answer. I think a fairer way to increase the number of graduates is to increase the number of athletes that truly have a chance to graduate.

If Duke can field a team that can win a championship while graduating more than 90 percent of its players, this means it does not often go after guys with no chance of receiving a degree.

More schools should follow that philosophy. And don’t say that big-name schools would no longer be part of the tournament because they could not get the best athletes.

In this year’s tournament North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois and several other big-name schools did not get bids – regardless of who they have on their respective rosters.

Isn’t graduating 100 percent of your players as exciting as winning a game or two in the NCAA Tournament?

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