Apr 11, 2016 5 min read

Imagine the Heisman Trophy being won by a football player at Harvard.

You don’t go to Harvard if you have designs on the Heisman. If you want that trophy, then you better show up at a school that belongs to one of the Power 5 conferences – Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC or Pac-12.

The last 25 winners have come from one of those and so has every national champion since 1989.

You probably shouldn’t go to Harvard if you’re interested in winning the Wooden Award, either. That goes to the best player in college basketball and was presented to Buddy Heild of Oklahoma Friday.

Your 2016 Hobey Baker Award (hockey’s Heisman) winner is Jimmy Vesey, a senior forward from Harvard. He’s a government major, who’s also a member of the Chinese Honor Society. I’m pretty sure that means that he learned to speak Chinese while he was playing hockey.

The NCAA hockey tournament has what might be called a cult following and doesn’t get 1/10th the attention that the NCAA football and basketball championships get, but it seems to be a lot closer to what college sports are supposed to be.

You know, real college students playing hockey.

Quinnipiac played North Dakota for the NCAA championship Saturday night. I did a quick check of their roster and found four engineering, two economics, two finance and one bio-medical science major.

Two years ago, I noticed there were two neuroscience majors on the Union College NCAA championship team.

How many neuroscience or bio-medical science majors do you think there were in the Power 5 conferences this year in either football or basketball?

Ninety-two percent of NCAA hockey players graduated last year.

Last Saturday, North Carolina and Syracuse faced each other in the semifinal of the NCAA basketball championship. Syracuse’s coach, Jim Boeheim, was suspended for nine games this season because of academic fraud.

The NCAA found that athletic staff members were taking tests and writing papers for basketball players beginning in 2005.

Boeheim said that rules were broken but that it was different from cheating.

Where are those basketball players now?

Chances are pretty good they’re not in the NBA.

Only 1.2 percent of college basketball players end up there.

Then there’s North Carolina, the team that beat Syracuse and went on to lose to Villanova on a buzzer-beater Monday night. For about 18 years, more than 1,500 athletes were encouraged to take phony courses that didn’t require showing up for class. The 2005 national championship team had several players taking several of them.

The coach, Roy Williams, says he knew nothing about it. At least one of his players said publicly that he did.

Here’s what David Ridpath, a sports administration professor at Ohio University told insidehighered.com:

“I think it’s an affirmation of what really matters. It’s a facade that we want to believe that this is all about students, and about them getting an education. We’re not watching students play college sports. We’re watching professional athletes in a disguise. We just want to watch the games. And that’s OK, but I think we need to be honest about it.”

I don’t think he was talking about NCAA hockey.

Most people reluctant to ask why college hockey has been able to exist at a high level without sacrificing academic integrity, and why institutions like Harvard, Yale and Rensselear Polytechnic Institute can be competitive with Power 5 schools like Michigan and Ohio State.

And, of course, the NCAA allows hockey players to be drafted by the NHL without losing their eligibility but not football and basketball players.

Lou Nanne, the grandson of a former NHL coach and general manager, was drafted by the Minnesota Wild in the 7th round in 2012. He decided to go to RPI instead. He’s not majoring in athletic coaching or parks and recreation. His degree will be in biomedical engineering.

The most popular major among football players at Michigan and Illinois is general studies. At Ohio State it’s sport industry and at Wisconsin it’s life sciences communication. At West Virginia, most football players major in general or multidisciplinary studies.

How many of those kids went to those schools with the idea that academics were second to football because they were headed to the NFL?

How many know that 1.69 percent of them will end up there?

How many graduated?

How many got jobs as a result of their degree?

Meanwhile, the media, instead of putting their energy into exposing the academic fraud and gross exploitation of young black men and asking how once-proud institutions have allowed football and basketball to destroy their academic integrity, waste their time crusading for the players to be paid, which amounts to total surrender to the madness.

And the big question is, would the media be as interested in enabling the corruption and the exploitation if the majority of the players were white?

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.