Editorial: Remove politics from UConn men’s basketball postseason ban

What do you get when you cross academics, athletics and two meddling Congressmen? What do you get when you cross academics, athletics and two meddling Congressmen?

The latest buzz to come out of the University of Connecticut’s basketball program.

The NCAA has effectively banned UConn’s men’s basketball team from the 2013 postseason because of the program’s past academic problems. The ban comes in response to the school’s years of low scores on the NCAA’s Academic Performance Rate, the measure of a program’s success at moving athletes toward graduation.

But U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. John Larson, both from Connecticut, have called the NCAA’s system “arbitrary and unfair” because it hurts current students who might have had nothing to do with the poor scores.

But this punishment is not aimed at the student-athletes — it’s aimed at the institution and program in general.

In October, the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors approved rules requiring a school to have a two-year average score of 930 or a four-year average of 900 on the annual APR in order to qualify for the 2013 postseason tournament. A 930 APR is just above a 50 percent graduation rate.

UConn views these standards as retroactive, but the NCAA maintains that schools have known since 2006 that APRs below 900 could result in penalties.

The program scored 826 for the 2009-10 school year. Its score for 2010-11 was 978. That gives it a two-year score of 902 and a four-year average of less than 890.

Recent scores have been better, however — The Huffington Post reports that the team had a perfect APR last semester. If the NCAA decided to consider the program’s recent scores, its postseason could be salvaged after all.

Last week, the NCAA denied UConn’s latest appeal for a waiver of the requirement, though the school is still hoping to have the rules changed to allow it to submit more recent test scores. The NCAA’s Committee on Academic Performance is expected to address that issue either later this month or in July.

Clearly, the school had been well-aware of changing policies, and crying “retroactive” is not an excuse for being waived from punishment. But the university itself is, of course, expected to contest this.

Blumenthal and Larson’s politicking is a different issue. Their misguided argument has been weakened significantly because they have stepped up to contest the policy only after UConn was found to have violated it. They have had plenty of time to fight this rule on principle — waiting until it adversely affects UConn makes the purity of the politicians’ motives dubious.

The concept of the student-athlete is far divorced from what it should be. And these politicians’ inherent support for the big-money institution of college sports is reprehensible.

UConn is not being targeted. It broke the rules, so it must pay the price.

And that price isn’t the welfare of its student-athletes — they still have their scholarships, and they still can play ball — it’s the rust that a banned postseason would put on the institution’s precious economic engine.

For the sake of whatever justice is left in the college sports realm, we hope the NCAA makes a prudent choice and upholds this decision. It must demonstrate that it values academic protocol at least a little bit.