A Pattern Runs Through It
UD has already marveled at the squalor of Montana State's criminal sports teams, assembled by a fully independent athletics department that doesn't care if you like to kill people as long as you also like to play football.
A law enforcement official who has studied the situation at Montana and at many other universities says there's a "pattern emerging, a growing problem ...schools are not able or willing to address."
Along these lines, Dance, a reader, sends UD a Sports Illustrated article detailing the Montana scandal:
[T]he university's athletic department has been importing crime to an idyllic mountain setting. The website Deadspin.com joked that Montana State was bringing Tony Montanas to Montana. Wrote [one citizen], "They're destroying the quality of life and general peace of mind in my hometown."
...The most recent six-year graduation rate, for the freshman class that entered in 1999-2000, was a mere 21% for football and 33% for basketball. Under the new NCAA benchmarks known as the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) and the Academic Progress Rate (APR), there is no breakdown based solely on transfers. But in 2003, the last year such figures were available, 2% of Montana State's football transfers and 13% of its basketball transfers graduated. The rate for black transfers in both sports: 0%.
...[The university's president] acknowledges that Montana State could have done more to prevent its athletic department from embarrassing the school and straining relations with the town. Most notably, says Gamble, "we should not have been bringing in recruits who had little or no chance of succeeding academically and socially."
Yet according to a report compiled last February by a panel of independent investigators hired by the school, the Bobcats had been doing just that for years. Investigators found that the football program had almost total autonomy in getting recruits admitted and that it was "prioritizing the team's competitive needs without full consideration of the academic impact" of taking large numbers of transfers. The report scolded the program for its low APR, which under NCAA guidelines caused the loss of three scholarships for the coming season. The basketball program was spared direct criticism, but the entire athletic department was cited for failing to properly review the academic credentials of incoming athletes, among other shortcomings.
When the report came out, Gamble said there was little in it he didn't already know...
It takes a special synergy -- cynical and indifferent presidents, criminally negligent athletic administrators, a whole lot of local yahoos who don't give a shit about what players do off-field -- to turn universities into crime syndicates. Montana State shows you how it's done.
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