Blackburn: NCAA penalizing FAMU with unfair standards that fail to consider financial resource gap

A recent op-ed by Tallahassee Democrat senior writer Doug Blackburn explains why it’s unfair for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to penalize colleges such as FAMU, which have relatively small athletic budgets, for not meeting the same Academic Progress Rate as schools that have much more money to spend.

From the op-ed “Tone deaf NCAA deals FAMU a low blow”:

Florida A&M University's two prime-time sports programs suffered a low blow a couple of weeks back when the NCAA ruled that the Rattlers' football and men's basketball teams will be banned from post-season competition during 2014-2015.

Student-athletes on those teams did not satisfy the APR (Academic Progress Rate) standards the NCAA instituted 10 years ago.

Shame on the NCAA for being tone deaf in a surround-sound world.

The well-staffed NCAA should know better than to take a one-size-fits-all approach to evaluating the hundreds of universities it governs.

Simply put, FAMU does not have the resources required to play the APR game. Not to diminish the value of what happens in the classroom, but APR numbers are not an accurate reflection of a school's student-athletes' academic performance.

They are more accurately a measure of the supervision and guidance given to student athletes, young men and women who often devote more than 25 hours a week to their school's teams.

Florida State has what it calls a modest budget for athletics, about $84 million, far less than those at Texas and Ohio State, the schools that FSU finished in between for the coveted Directors Cup.

FAMU, on the other hand, struggles to make ends meet with a $9 million budget for athletics. FSU receives more than double FAMU's entire budget just in TV revenue.

FSU has scores or graduate students serving as tutors and advisors for its student athletes, in addition to its team of compliance folks.

FAMU has one full-time compliance officer who has an assistant. I'm sure FAMU administrators would love to have three or four times that number devoted to helping their student-athletes take care of business. Simply put, the playing field is far from level and the NCAA refuses to address the issue.

This isn't a simple issue. The argument could be made that FAMU does not have the resources to be a Division I athletic program, that it creates its own financial nightmare by wanting to be eligible to go to college basketball's big dance.

For now, though, FAMU is a D-1 school without D-1 resources. The NCAA needs to recognize this and adjust its APR criteria. To evaluate all schools by the same standards when their budgets are in no way comparable simply isn't fair. The penalties FAMU was forced to accept say far more about the NCAA than they do about Florida A&M University.

Read the full op-ed here at the Tallahassee Democrat.