“Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” will air an episode featuring a six-month investigation into academic advising centers at the University of Oklahoma, University of Memphis and University of North Carolina.
A 45 second trailer released this week features Oklahoma professor Gerald Gurney, who previously estimated that 10 percent of athletes on revenue-producing sports teams read below a fourth grade level.
This may sound insane but is very likely true. The disparity between the ability of high school students in wealthy districts and those in poorer districts is absolutely insane (and in the eye of this high school teacher, utterly unacceptable), and given the amount of big time collegiate athletes that originate from disadvantaged schools, it seems likely that a wide swath of athletes are deficient in key academic areas.
The idea of the mythical "scholar athlete" is often just that, a myth, but the NCAA continues to perpetuate it because if they treat it as anything else then they'd be forced to reevaluate the way that they treat players.
