College Football 2012: JUCO Legislation Aims to Keep Kids Down

The NCAA, an organization that is supposed to be looking out for the best interest of student-athletes, is staring down some pretty moving reforms on the admissions side of things. This past fall, the folks in Indianapolis green lit a measure to boost the qualifying GPA from 2.0 to 2.3 for high school to college enrollees and from 2.0 to 2.5 for junior college transfers. As Dana O'Neil of ESPN pointed out in April, this big move is going to drastically alter the landscape where junior college transfers are concerned.

Most kids enrolled in junior college go there because of struggles qualifying the first time around. Junior college is a way for ball players to get accustomed to college-level work and grow their study skills while playing football in the hopes of earning a shot after their two-year stay. In a nutshell, junior college is about giving yourself another shot. It is about putting yourself in a position to qualify for the opportunity the player missed coming out of high school.

There are plenty of folks out there that will argue for the NCAA "beefing up" their academic standards. After all, by putting more pressure on the athletes to achieve higher they are, in theory, better prepares the junior college transfer to succeed at the collegiate level.

Except the NCAA is putting more on the junior college transfers than on the high school student and the already enrolled collegiate athlete. As Steve Forbes, a basketball coach at Northwest Florida State describes things to O'Neil:

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“If you wanted to go to a 2.25, that’s fine,’’ he said. “But it’s like they fished 2.5 out of the air and it’s like, ‘OK, here you go, boom.’ If you’re a junior at Tennessee, you don’t need a 2.5. If you’re a one-and-done, you only need to pass six hours. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, but the bottom line, we don’t really have a voice or a choice. We have to do what they tell us to do.’’

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George Rush, one of the legends of the juco football coaching ranks, in a recent, very in-depth article with CBS Sports' Bruce Feldman, expounds upon the issue with the new rule. The longtime coach at City College of San Francisco makes it pretty clear to Feldman how he feels:

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What frustrates and angers Rush more than anything these days is the changes in the system that he says is squeezing his players in a way he says is appalling and unfair.

"Whenever I see those NCAA commercials when I watch March Madness, where they say 'these are our athletes, these are the leaders of America,' I wanna throw up," Rush says. He calls the NCAA "a monstrous monopoly," run by a bunch of "hypocrites."

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The governing body of the college athletic landscape is moving the goalpost on the folks operating at the junior college level, making it more difficult for the partial qualifiers to get things in order to enroll at a four-year institution.

It's a sad state of affairs as the NCAA, an organization that champions their desire to help student-athletes, is attempting to cut plenty of young athletes out of the chance to get an education. Individual schools already have their own standards as far as who they will and will not let into school; institutions are free to accept or not accept transfers from any university that they please. What the NCAA is doing is stacking the deck against these young athletes that need the help and the structure of that collegiate athletic environment, as Rush points out:

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"The more you get into this and the more you see how grievous an organization it is. I understand that if somebody doesn't have the academic wherewithal to be at admitted to Cal or Fresno State or Stanford then the institution shouldn't admit them. This isn't a baby-sitting service. But if you're admissible to that university, who are they to say no?

"I'd ask this of college presidents, are these kids better off at Cal or San Diego State or San Jose State and having a two or three-year college experience coming out of junior college working with someone and getting a shot to having a better life than not graduating or never having that experience at all? It's a pretty self-evident answer. They obviously have a better chance in that college environment than in some gang-filled area where they don't know if they're going to wake up the next day. Just that experience can change not only what I want for my life, and for what I want from my children."

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This is about real young people. Not statistics. Someone who wants to use the tools of football to overcome setbacks and earn a degree. People who want an opportunity to get out instead of remaining in the throes of cyclical poverty and lack of education. The point that so many people do not get about the 2.0 and the 2.5 is that everyone does not have the same starting point. Now, just as kids are busting their behinds to catch up, the NCAA is moving back the finish line.