It’s about offering an opportunity

The old coaching copout is that college recruiting isn’t an exact science, and if you’ve been watching the train wreck across the mountains the latest Exhibit A seems to be Casey Paus.

But perhaps even less exact is the science of college admissions. I have intimate knowledge, for instance, of one 3.7 high school GPAer who had no business taking up space in Humanities 105, especially in view of the fact that he tried to jump-start an essay about the Book of Job with a quote from Sonny Liston.

So the Lawrence Ball affair – the young man who was denied entrance this summer to Washington State University and was quickly scooped up by the University of Arizona – isn’t about villains and victims. Some serious and committed people did their jobs and came away with different versions of what was best for Wazzu and for Lawrence Ball.

At least let’s hope Lawrence’s best interests were duly considered.

The unhappy upshot is that the serious and committed people on the football staff just saw their jobs get tougher. One recruit’s rejection weighed against an incoming freshman class of 3,100 isn’t going to establish whether that’s a necessary thing, but it’s certainly a real thing.

If the Ball case was curious – a player meeting the NCAA’s standards but not the school’s, and having his denied twice – so was the overview provided by one member of the faculty’s admissions subcommittee.

“Athletics does not wag the dog,” Dr. Wesley Leid told The Spokesman-Review’s Glenn Kasses. “The dog in this case is academics and athletics is the tail.”

Hmm. If that’s been the case, with 18 winning football seasons in the last 50 years, that must be one tiny dog.

Nor was I alone in being unaware that someone had been trying to tinker with the mutt’s anatomy.

“When I read that,” said Dr. Keith Campbell, “I was shocked and disappointed.”

Campbell is a distinguished professor of pharmacy who served on that same subcommittee for more than seven years. He also, in the late 1980s at the behest of former WSU president Sam Smith, helped establish the athletic department’s academic support system, which in some respects has been the one true success story of Cougar athletics even beyond any return to the Rose Bowl.

Or don’t the names Leon Bender, Eboni Wilson, C.J. Davis, Nian Taylor and Frank Madu – to pick out a few – ring a bell?

All, in their day, were “props” – snagged by what the NCAA originally passed as Proposition 48 because of their high school shortcomings and made to sit out football as freshmen. Nowadays, they’re just “non-qualifiers” and they don’t get in at all.

But in their time, thanks to the serious and committed people in the academic support unit and their own diligent work, Bender and Co. got out of WSU with degrees. Madu got two. Wilson is merely a Ph.D.

You wonder if they’d get through the net now.

“I know Dr. Leid and he’s a nice man and he cares,” Campbell said. “There’s not a faculty member who doesn’t share his concern. But hasn’t anybody explained the system and showed them how good the results have been? Really, it’s ridiculous to suggest that the tail has been wagging the dog.”

Just as it was for Leid to say, “We are not doing (the players) a service by just letting them in.”

Again, many salaries – for advisors, tutors, problem-solvers – are being paid by the athletic department so such a thing occurs.

To be fair, that unit wasn’t created in a vacuum. Campbell recalls receiving a phone call from the late activist attorney Carl Maxey in the late 1980s. Maxey had been approached by a handful of African-American athletes who felt they’d been admitted to WSU to play football without anyone much caring whether they received an education or graduated. However legitimate their point of view, it sent Campbell into Smith’s office and led to the decision to play offense instead of defense.

It wasn’t as if the committee in Campbell’s day didn’t turn down some athletic appeals. Nor was the support unit created just to find kids tutors. A number of WSU professors volunteered to be faculty mentors with the mission of unlocking some of these academic mysteries. Campbell himself took on the likes of Bender, Chad Eaton, Singor Mobley and Mark Fields, among others.

“Leon was one of the greatest success stories,” he said. “I was the guy who determined he had seizure disorders (which would, tragically, kill him not long after graduation) and got him into a doctor who prescribed the right meds. That kind of turned him around and he wound up fulfilling all the requirements (for a degree).”

Naturally, not every recruited athlete has the same needs. What Wazzu and other schools have recognized is that, for the price of their scholarship, their athletes are in essence holding down a job that can be closer to full time than part time. And to do the job of being a student properly, they could use some help.

“There are purists out there, I know, who say we just ought to take the best students, period,” Campbell said. “I don’t think that’s what a university, a state university, has to be about. If I can make a student move from where he is – a kid with brains and ability – and help him learn his intellectual potential, then I’ve done a good job. Sometimes you have to help them overcome things in their background that haven’t allowed that side to open up.”

There are numbers suggesting whatever Wazzu’s been doing is working. In the last accounting done by the NCAA – covering the incoming class of 1996-97 and its progress over the next six years – WSU’s graduation rate for all male students was 57 percent. The football team’s was 60. As a whole, WSU athletes in that measuring period graduated at 67 percent, better than the all-school rate of 62.

Only once in the last four measuring periods has football not bettered the WSU male rate.

There is no need to feel sorry for Lawrence Ball, who finds himself at a good school receiving the same opportunity he could have had at WSU.

But what, exactly, is being wagged?