The academic support unit for athletes at the University of Oklahoma covers 31,000 square feet in the football stadium, or enough to fill up most of Bill Gates' mansion. It feels like a college within a college, with classrooms, faculty on site, seven learning centers for writing and other skills, 215 computers, 138 tutors on every course imaginable, specialists in learning disabilities, and a team of advisors who help athletes pick majors and courses.

Oklahoma spends $1.2 million a year on the unit, triple the budget from a decade ago. But here's the only number that seems to count these days: 0.

	With players like Carmelo Anthony tempted to jump early to the NBA, schools like Syracuse could be penalized under the NCAA's academic reform.

As in the zero percent graduation rate for the men's basketball team.

"There must be a base below which academic performance is unacceptable," NCAA President Myles Brand told the National Press Club in a speech last month. "Under no circumstances can it be acceptable not to graduate any men's basketball player in five years, which unfortunately has recently occurred at 36 Division I schools."

A new NCAA proposal puts teams like Oklahoma in potential jeopardy of being punished. In the future, teams with low academic success rates -- the measurements for which are currently being worked out -- could face the loss of scholarships, or in extreme cases, banishment from postseason competition.

Teams with stellar academic records, by contrast, could be rewarded with extra scholarships or recruiting advantages.

The proposal, backed by the school presidents who run the NCAA through their control of the Division I board of directors, would apply to teams in all sports. But men's basketball is the driving consideration, for its 34 percent graduation rate nationally for the largest schools -- those in Division I-A -- stands in stark contrast to the 59 percent rate for all athletes and 60 percent for all students.

For black basketball players, the rate is 26 percent. For white players, 49 percent.

"We have always rewarded competitive success but we have never rewarded academic success in a collective way," said Jim Delany, the Big Ten commissioner who is a member of the NCAA working group that is developing the proposal. "We have always disincentivized coaches if they lose too many games, but we have never disincentivized them if they fail to perform academically."

	Division I-A graduation rates
	Percentages for the most recent four-year graduation rates evaluated by the U.S. Department of Education. Athletes in each entering class, up through 1995-96, had six years to finish their degree.
	Men's basketball	34
	Women's basketball	65
	Football	50
	Baseball	44
	All athletes	59
	All students	60
	Source: U.S. Department of Education; 2002 NCAA Graduation Rates Report; Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports

The proposal has the potential to be the most significant NCAA initiative in decades, if Brand, Delany and school presidents live up to their rhetoric. Of the 65 teams that competed in the current NCAA Tournament, 29 graduated no more than a third of their players in the four years of recruiting classes leading up to the 1995-96 class, the most recent one evaluated by the U.S. Department of Education. Under current measurements, athletes must earn their degrees within six years after enrollment to count as graduates.

Besides Oklahoma, Memphis and Utah State also have 0 percent rates. Other NCAA Tournament men's teams that might be in trouble if the system was in place today include Louisville and Missouri (each at 10 percent), Alabama and Colorado (13 percent), Arizona and Cal (15 percent), LSU and Cincinnati (17 percent), Utah (20 percent), and last year's national champion, Maryland (14 percent).

Of this year's Final Four teams in New Orleans, only two teams graduated more than half of their players: Marquette (69 percent) and Kansas (70 percent). Texas has a 38 percent graduation rate, while Syracuse has the lowest rate, at 25 percent.

In the women's NCAA Tournament, Oklahoma, at 27 percent, had the weakest rate among the 64 teams.

"The Big Ten would be less affected than most leagues because we have very strict academic requirements," said Purdue coach Gene Keady, whose team has a 50 percent graduation rate in the latest four-class evaluation. "I think (people) are hypocritical a lot of times because we graduated all four of our seniors last year and all I heard about was that we were 13-18."

Many coaches, though, are nervous about the impending system.

	“	So you mean we wouldn't be able to play in the tournament because a guy left for the NBA early and made millions of dollars and another guy transferred to another school to play? Is that right? Is that fair? When you start punishing schools for things like that, you're just way off base. ”
		— Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim

"So under a penalty formula, if you don't graduate, say, 50 percent of your players -- which everybody seems to think that would be reasonable -- well, then you can't play in the tournament?" Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. "So you mean we wouldn't be able to play in the tournament because a guy left for the NBA early and made millions of dollars and another guy transferred to another school to play?

"Is that right? Is that fair? When you start punishing schools for things like that, you're just way off base."

Of Brand's leadership on this issue, Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun said, "We need someone that really understands basketball."

Brand really understands universities. He is the first NCAA chief who has run a university, as president of Indiana University. In Bloomington, he famously fired Bobby Knight, whose flaws ultimately brought more attention to the school than his virtues -- which ironically included allegiance to his athletes' education. Brand, who tolerated Knight's unruly behavior for a while, learned the hard way that a basketball program is not something to be left unchallenged, even if the athletes in that program constitute the tiniest fraction of the student population.

On the graduation-rates issue, some of Brand's bosses, the school presidents, say nothing less is at stake than the marriage between universities and high-profile sports entertainment. That's "because colleges and universities are not going to be able to give up in any serious way on their real mission in life," University of Texas president Larry Faulkner said. "Their mission in life is not to host the sports teams. Their mission in life is to develop young people. So we have to make the (athletics and education) fit because we all have an interest in maintaining this great cultural tradition."

Division I universities are increasingly vulnerable to the charge that they're really into college basketball and football for financial, not educational, reasons. Revenues in those sports continue to rise, fueling a pay-for-play bill in Nebraska and growing skepticism about whether schools do right by athletes. In a December issue of Business Week, the NCAA was declared to be "the best little monopoly in America" -- more impressive than Microsoft or even the U.S. Postal Service -- by a panel of Harvard economists.

But the NCAA's ability to avoid sharing more of its money with players is based on the notion that the athletes are at least getting an education.

Reforming accountability

Five key questions to be addressed in the coming months that will help determine whether the school presidents who run the NCAA are serious about improving the academic performance of athletes in revenue sports such as basketball and football: Will players who leave school early count against the graduation rate? Coaches only want to count recruits who exhaust their eligibility at the school they started at as freshmen. But failing to count recruits who drop out or transfer to another school gives coaches one less reason to keep from running off unproductive players. NCAA leaders appear willing to discount athletes who left early in "good academic standing," although there's some discomfort with one-and-out stars using college as nothing more than a temporary springboard to the NBA. What constitutes "good academic standing"? Each university draws up its own rules for that term, as do individual colleges within each university. At some schools, it's easy to fall out of "good academic standing." At others, it may take several semesters of poor grades to lose that status. To level the playing field, there's talk about using the NCAA's continuing eligibility standards as the measurement. If an athlete is eligible to play, he's golden. How low is too low? If the NCAA stops counting transfers and uses a more puffed-up graduation rate, the Knight Commission's suggestion of a 50 percent minimum mark for schools to remain eligible for postseason play might seem conservative. Ultimately, factors such as progression toward degree will count as well, potentially giving whatever metric emerges a BCS-like complexity. Resolve to punish academic laggards could be compromised by commercial and legal concerns. How much sunshine? Ben Howland, new UCLA coach, says he worries that a penalty system will force athletes to seek easy majors, or those that won't do them any good after college, because teams don't want to be punished. Those forces are already at play in keeping athletes eligible for competition, but it's a valid concern. The Drake Group, made up national faculty members, wants greater transparency -- lists of courses and teachers favored by athletes -- as a check on abuse. What about sport demands on athletes? If you want athletes to be students, give them time to be students, some say. Gerry Gurney, Oklahoma's academic chief for athletics, favors containing each sport to one semester. But increasingly, participating in college sports is becoming a year-round commitment. Nowhere in the current set of academic reform proposals is there any discussion of cutting back on the number of (often lucrative) games. -- Tom Farrey

"I think it would be easier for the NCAA and for coaches to just recognize that they're a professional business, and take away the amateurism," said Linda Bensel-Meyers, director of The Drake Group, a national faculty organization that strives to reform college sports. "It would be easier for the athletes, too, who aren't getting anything now for this promise that we'll give them an education in exchange for what they bring into the coffers of the school."

Bensel-Meyers regards the NCAA's academic incentives/disincentives structure -- as it is known -- as a recipe for more academic fraud. In recent months, the basketball programs at Fresno State, Georgia and St. Bonaventure have been flagged for cutting corners with academics. Punish teams that don't graduate players, and faculty are going to be under even more pressure to change grades or accept papers from athletes who got questionable help from athletic-department tutors.

"I think that's possible," Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione said. "I'm not here to condemn the whole system. But I do believe that the chances of that are greater than what we've ever seen before. The pressure is going to be so great that there may be some problems for certain student-athletes coming out of high schools."

The framework of the plan is being worked out this spring, with the expectation that implementation will begin in August 2004. According to a NCAA document circulated March 11 to universities, the first aspect of the system to go into effect would be incentives to programs with "exemplary" graduation rates. The NCAA also may keep teams from replacing scholarship players who left the program, most likely if the athlete departed in poor academic standing.

Full implementation of the program will come in the fall of 2006, when the NCAA can begin to keep teams out of postseason play. That leaves schools with three years to prepare to avoid the consequences of a failing to meet benchmarks.

The Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a blue-ribbon panel led by former university presidents, has recommended that teams that do not graduate half of their players be banned from postseason play. But the NCAA working committee has not arrived on benchmarks for punishment, though it has made clear it plans to use more than graduation rates to evaluate a team's academic success.

The NCAA also wants to measure how many athletes from each recruiting class remain eligible as they move from their freshman through their senior years. A real-time snapshot of an athlete's academic status would be taken each year, with points awarded for staying in good academic standing.

Graduation rates will still matter but they probably will be calculated in a more forgiving manner than the current standard used by the U.S. Department of Education, said Vanderbilt athletic director Todd Turner, who chairs the NCAA working group. Many college coaches rail against current measurement because, among other reasons, players who transfer out of the program count against the team's graduation rate.

"If a kid goes to another school and graduates, he doesn't count for you," Calhoun said. "How are those things possible? And who's being exploited? There's no question that there are people who are in this business, and universities, who have allowed kids not to be educated as well as they should be. For that, shame on us. We should be chastised for that. But I think you need to look into each school's situation."

Elite programs such as UConn and Syracuse effectively serve as farm teams for the NBA, with some players leaving early for the pros and others transferring to other schools to find playing time. In college football, programs like Oklahoma also have taken hits to their graduation rate -- the Sooners are at 26 percent -- due to transfers and NFL-bound players.

"There's a myth out there that all these guys are just going to school, and leaving, and they end up unemployed someplace in the gutter," Boeheim said. "That's not what happens. Every player who ever played at Syracuse has got a job today. Every one."

In creating its punishment system, the NCAA will have to weigh whether it wants to reward programs that are not commonly used as feeder systems for the pros.

"My advice to those coaches who are concerned that sanctions for poor academic performance will disadvantage their teams is to recruit student-athletes who are academically capable and to send a clear message to those who have athletic talent to apply themselves to their studies in high school and even earlier," Brand told the National Press Club.

Fat chance, say college coaches.

	'I'm always going to look for a kid that may slip through the cracks that you give an opportunity to (so he can) work and overachieve in the classroom,' Sooners coach Kelvin Sampson said.

"This isn't 'Alice in Wonderland,' " Oklahoma basketball coach Kelvin Sampson said. "You're not going to change the rules and all of a sudden everything is really good now, everything is all puff clouds and marshmallows. I'm always going to look for a kid that may slip through the cracks that you give an opportunity to (so he can) work and overachieve in the classroom."

Indeed, new changes in the NCAA's eligibility rules may make it even more difficult for coaches to keep from signing marginally academic recruits. Beginning this year, high school athletes no longer need at least an 820 on their SAT to qualify for a scholarship and play as freshmen. If their grades are good enough, all they need is a 400 -- the lowest possible score. Yet once on a college campus, they'll be required to earn more credits each year to keep playing.

"In short, it has made it easier for student-athletes to get in but harder to stay," said Castiglione, who opposes the new entrance standards but supports the rest of the academic reform package.

The situation leaves Brand and the school presidents with serious decisions to make, as the incentives/disincentives plan takes shape. Approve a metric that goes easy on teams with low academic success rates, and coaches will be encouraged to sign athletes with SAT scores 600 or 800 points below the campus norm -- opening the presidents up to further charges of exploitation. But go heavy on the punishment, and they risk hammering teams that are at the core of their entertainment product.

There's another option under loose consideration as well, Turner said. The NCAA could force teams to wear uniform patches signifying their academic success rate, a gesture of public shame sure to motivate coaches, once opposing fans take notice.

"That's the equivalent of putting a dunce cap on students," Castiglione said, aghast.

Sort of how college presidents feel when asked why they can't graduate athletes.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com and can be reached at tom.farrey@espn3.com. His companion Outside the Lines report airs Sunday on ESPN at 10:30 a.m. ET.