Ncaa Rule Taylor-Made For Injustice

So now that Nian Taylor has a diploma from Washington State University, the NCAA has finally decided he’s college material.

Hmm. Too bad there aren’t initial eligibility standards for educrats.

Graduation Saturday dawned gray and chilly in Pullman, but there was one particularly sunny soul among WSU’s nearly 5,000 commencementeers. Nian Niann Niary Taylor received his degree in social science and could have been excused had he decided to strike a Heisman pose on stage, symbolically stiff-arming the doubters who never knew him and policy makers who mean well but miss the point.

Saturday was Nian Taylor’s day.

He went in a “Prop.” He came out a graduate.

And so how will he celebrate his liberation from this unfortunate old stigma? By returning to school - and the football program - for one more year.

This is, of course, a terrific development for the Cougars, who can use Taylor’s talents as a pass receiver next fall and his diligent presence as an example to young players - even if he is something of a freak of the NCAA’s machinations.

And Taylor can exploit the system to his advantage, too.

“I’ve accomplished all I want to, except one thing - and that’s to go to the NFL,” Taylor said. “But I’m not ready.

“I want to finish out on a better note. I don’t want to finish hurt, I don’t want to finish 3-8. I want to go to a bowl game and I want to have a solid season for myself.”

Yet here is just another irony to digest - that this supposed academic risk has the proper papers from WSU to function in the college afterlife, but by his own estimation doesn’t quite yet have the game.

When Taylor enrolled at WSU back in 1995, he did so with a 3.0 grade point average from high school but without a score on his Scholastic Aptitude Test high enough to make him eligible to play as a freshman. He didn’t meet the guidelines set out in the NCAA’s original Proposition 48 and amended at a later convention as Proposition 16.

He was Prop. And so he sat.

These are the same guidelines that were recently overturned by a U.S. district court judge as being too reliant on scores from standardized tests - tests which, it was argued and the judge bought, discriminate against minority students.

So does it?

“I don’t know,” admitted Taylor, who is African-American. “I took it a couple of times. I just didn’t know a lot of the stuff in there. After a while, I didn’t even try because I knew I couldn’t answer the questions. And I had study sessions, tutors, everything.”

Under the original rule, a Prop forfeited his freshman year of athletics. In 1997, after 13 years of this ripoff, the NCAA got around to offering Props their year back. The catch was, they didn’t just have to make normal progress toward a degree, but actually nail down a diploma in four years.

They had to be out of school to stay in school.

Logic aside, this was the first indication that the NCAA was even remotely as concerned about how kids performed academically in member schools as how they fared in high school.

It was, as usual, too little, too late.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” said WSU receivers coach Mike Levenseller, “but if it was really fair, then Jesse Ratcliff and Eboni Wilson would be getting their freshman year back, too.”

Those two Cougars defensive linemen were Props the same year Taylor was - Ratcliff on the most egregious of technicalities, yet something not atypical in the NCAA system of justice. In any case, not only did they sit out that first year, but redshirted the next.

“And the (eligibility) clock still runs,” Levenseller said. “Because we played Nian his second year, he benefited. A year or two sooner and he doesn’t get that year back. And the kids who were not quite ready to play don’t benefit at all.”

Levenseller is no anarchist. He believes some system to determine eligibility needs to be in place, but tends to go along with the judge who struck down the SAT. And he’s even more uncomfortable with the Pac-10 and other conferences cinching down on the number of partial qualifiers schools are allowed to accept.

“It’s almost a moot point now,” he said of Taylor’s situation. “You don’t get those kids anymore, and that’s a shame. We’re not talking about kids who are renegades. They were good kids who didn’t fit on somebody’s scale. But they grew up and most of them did real well and never would have had that opportunity under the rules as they’re written now.”

No, not all of them succeeded. Malcolm Stewart, another ‘95 Prop, never suited up. But Frank Madu, who graduated that year, not only played two sports at WSU, but earned two degrees.

Taylor will tell you there’s something to be said for being a Prop.

“All you can do is work out and study,” he said of that freshman year. “We couldn’t go to practice, couldn’t play, couldn’t go to meetings. That leaves a lot of time for the library.”

But there is more academic help available to the student-athlete (and the average student) than ever before. And that, not the initial eligibility standards or unblinking adherence to the SAT, is what’s behind the 15 percent improvement (since 1984) in graduation rates for African-American athletes the NCAA so loudly touts. Because, as it happens, graduation rates for African-American non-athletes have jumped at the same rate.

Meanwhile, the percentage of African-Americans receiving scholarships has dropped. That’s what Prop 48/16 has accomplished, and that’s why the judge said it’s a boondoggle.

And yet here is the NCAA, still putting up its dukes on appeal, more concerned about rules than fairness.

Nian Taylor doesn’t need a college degree to see the insanity in that.

But, bless him, he has one anyway.