Making Grade: Who Cares? : USC leads UCLA in graduation rates, but you can bet that won’t be what the alumni are talking about during the season.

Those tight lips and knitted brows you passed while skipping happily to the box scores recently, worry not.

They are only the annual college athlete graduation rates.

Like a mild rash, they will disappear soon.

For 51 weeks a year, most of us care only which college athletes win.

This is the week we also care who gets diplomas.

Well, would you look at that:

USC beats UCLA in overall athletes from the 1992 freshman class, 59% to 49%.

And how about this:

USC football beats UCLA in football, 61% to 58%.

Amazing numbers indeed.

Amazing not that they are so bad, but that they are so good.

Given the professional climate that has become as constant in college sports as an ugly day at Ohio State--where only 35% of the football players are graduating--it’s amazing more of these kids don’t think “Pomp and Circumstance” is a big-and-tall shop.

Their national championship football game is blanketed in a potato chip bag.

Their basketball Final Four gives the schools a bigger endowment than four dead billionaires.

Coaches are walking shoe advertisements on the sidelines, rich alumni are walking ATM machines in the stands, and college presidents are often walking horses for both of them.

And yet this week, everybody is wondering why more UCLA athletes didn’t pass geography?

“When you look at the whole industry that college sports has become, the kid is the least powerful person in the system,” said Dr. Todd Boyd, author and professor in the USC School of Cinema-Television. “To talk about these grand old ideas of amateur sports . . . this is all just a business.”

A business of leather, or pigskin, or anything but sheepskin.

UCLA felt compelled to explain that its 49% rate--second-worst in the Pacific 10, and 29 percentage points worse than the UCLA general student population rate--was due to transfers and dropouts by athletes from the recently disbanded sports of men’s swimming and gymnastics.

“I think you have to look a lot deeper than the numbers,” said Betsy Stephenson, associate athletic director.

USC, which ranked sixth in the conference at 59%, 11 points less than its general student rate, also wanted to clarify.

“We are satisfied, but not pleased,” said Fred Stroock, special assistant to the athletic director.

No need, no need.

There was a time when success in the classroom and success in the field went together, but that was about the last time Dayton made the Final Four.

That year was 1967. Today the Flyers are known for their nationally top-ranked graduation rate--95%--but little else.

In fact, none of the top 11 graduation-rate teams has won anything major since that 1992 freshman class, unless you count Northwestern’s loss in the Rose Bowl and Stanford’s loss in the Final Four.

Today, athletes leave early for the NFL and NBA and Olympics and baseball. Others get mad at losing starting jobs and transfer. Others get injured and quit, because athletics were the only reason they picked up the handbook in the first place.

There’s a strong wind out there, and these good academic advisors are spitting into it.

“To be honest with you, it’s almost a lost cause,” said Boyd, who is finishing a book about the basketball culture. “The obvious thing for schools to do about sports is to acknowledge that this is not an integral part of the university. This is separate.”

And while basketball and football make up the majority of dropouts, the climate can be found in all sports.

True story:

A water polo player from a prominent local university seemed destined for academic stardom when his advisor checked transcripts from his first two seasons.

It turns out, the water polo coach had told the athlete to take easy classes. So the athlete didn’t have the credits to advance into the necessary program.

The athlete, who could not pursue his selected major because of his lack of credits, graduated only after he suffered a career-ending injury and the coach forgot all about him.

Another true story:

A woman was eligible for a prestigious honors course at a prominent local university, but she would have to miss important practice time with the cheerleaders.

The cheerleading coach told her that was not an option, so the woman did not pursue the honors course.

“I was flabbergasted,” said the professor who told me this story. “I told her, sports does not drive academics, it is the other way around.”

Dream on.

Come to think of it, USC and UCLA may be doing too well in academics.

Their respective football graduation rates of 61% and 58% are far better than defending national champion Tennessee’s rate of 34%, or Kansas State’s 47%, or Michigan’s 52%.

Nice numbers, but not final scores. And which do you think the alumni will be e-mailing each other about on Sunday?

“The bad guy that nobody talks about in all of this is the alumni who used to sit in math and science class and could never play . . . but now they have money and live vicariously through the team,” said Dr. Carl Voigt, associate dean of USC’s School of Business. “They do all kinds of things that place winning ahead of academics.”

One way to end this annual graduation rate farce is to change the entire system so that college athletes are on a separate track with separate goals that do not involve a degree.

But that wouldn’t be fair to the hundreds of student-athletes who, either by necessity or design, truly use their scholarships for four for five years of education.

“To cut sports out of the regular college system entirely would hurt the guy who gets the scholarship, and isn’t good enough to play much, but uses the free education to make something of himself,” Voigt said.

One rule change that has been proposed by some colleges would cut one scholarship for every scholarship athlete that attends school at least four years and does not graduate.

But is it UCLA’s fault that Baron Davis needed the money?

Maybe we should simply all sit back, watch the game, enjoy the players, and don’t look too close when they flash the name of a major.

At least neither UCLA nor USC suffered three celebrated dropouts in one month this spring.

That happened, you’ll remember, at the backwoods little cream puff known as Duke.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected].