Academic Standards or Racial Barrier? Inside Prop 48’s Controversial Legacy

So it's January nineteen eighty three in a ballroom in a hotel in Dallas, Texas, and heads of colleges from around the country are there to argue a rule should be in place that would change college sports forever. The rule was Proposition forty eight, which would have GPA and test requirements for any athlete to play sports. There was arguments going on all day, but with a two thirds vote, they passed, putting students first, even if it was a flawed rule. Today, we're going to dive into Proposition forty eight when the few times n c double A has put students ahead of athletes today on Daily Sports. History, Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide because I was a student way before I was anything you could call an athlete. So the NCAA was originally created to help student athletes be safe, and over the years it's morphed into lots of different things, and today the term student athletes a little bit vague, But back in the seventies and eighties, it was a major thing that you were a student first and athlete second. At least that's what they told us. But around this time, the TV era was starting to take over college football. College basketball were starting to get major TV viewings, and schools were really operating on their own special admissions for athletes without a national criteria. So there were programs that were letting players in that couldn't even read or write, had never even learned in school, were just passed through because of the sports they played. And then they did investigations into some schools in nineteen seventy eight, like SMU and Oklahoma, and they found out that there were friendly professors fabricating transcripts of their star players to make sure they can make it to the field. And by the early nineteen eighties, fewer than thirty percent of the scholarship football players actually earned a degree, and that was even lower for the black athletes who may have struggled even more in high school and early education based off segregation. And even the New York Times and Sports Illustrated the mid nineteen eighties did an investigation where they questioned the literacy of athletes and whether universities were just warehouses for players to give them revenue and get them ready maybe to play pro sports. And this was a time when moral panic was going on. You saw people afraid of video games. You saw people afraid of what was happening with the youth today, and this really transitioned into adjusting how major programs really worked. So by nineteen eighty one, sixty percent of the starting football players at major college programs were black, and yet the majority of them came from urban schools that were just less funded. Less than forty percent of these schools even offered a college prepar like programs. Then there were some studies that came out that linked a correlation between SAT scores and family income and future college GPA. Now there are some other studies that came out that showed there was some bias in these SAT or standardized tests, that they had racist tendencies that allowed non black test takers to have more success. But a lot of these studies were still coming out and still new, so it wasn't a foreground conclusion. So in January nineteen eighty three, at a hotel in Dallas, NCAA delegates got together to talk about this issue. There were over nine hundred delegates. It was a big moment. This was talked about all over for this vote on where whether they should have a standardized minimum for a student athlete to actually join, and they brought together something called Proposition forty eight. Now, this would have the requirements that they must have a minimum of a two point zero GPA, and they also needed eleven core high school courses and a minimum test score on the SAT or ACT. For SAT it was a minimum of seven hundred and for the ACT it was a minimum of fifteen. Any athlete that failed to have this GPA and this test score would not be eligible for their freshman year, so no competition, no athletic aid, they could not receive a scholarship. The delegates argued that there were scandals going on at these academic factories. It was unfair to have these players who were student athletes not actually be able to be competent students. People were taking advantage of these players to make their schools money, but many worried that they would lose half their talent pool overnight. It would be detriment to the teams and to the sports as well. There were historic black college leaders there and they advocated that these testings were actually not favorable to black athletes and they were not giving the same education in black urban areas opposed to the whitier schools and it was just about twenty years earlier that there were still segregated whites and black schools, and now that they were desegregated, it didn't mean that there were still not majority black schools majority white schools, and so it made it very difficult as the black schools were not funded as well and given the same opportunities. So this would not only make the talent pool and recruiting harder, it would be harder for black athletes as well, which took up a majority of the athletics going on in NCAA. But John Toner, the NCAA president at the time, reported that this rule would raise the expectations of the athlete's students first and help them actually succeed to get a degree, although Thomas Bonner, the representative of the Historic Black Colleges, said, you're not raising the standards, you're raising barriers because even though these athletes couldn't meet the standards when they first entered school, they could learn while they're in school and get a degree that would help them for the rest of their lives. And so with all this conversation going on, after hours of deliberating, they took a vote and it passed two thirds majority with all the Division one delegates, So now there was a minimum to become a student athlete. There were headlines that said NCAA adopts standard to curb academic abuse. The Washington Post said most blacks affected by Proposition forty eight. Now it wouldn't take effect right away. It was nineteen eighty three. It wouldn't take effect until the fall of nineteen eighty six, and it really hit heavy that first year. About six hundred to eight hundred athletes were actually declared ineligible in that first year alone, and roughly ninety percent of these athletes were black in football and basketball. Universities were scrambling for non athletic funds to help enroll these students so they could make the minimum in the following year, and there were retroactive studies done that showed that prior to prop forty eight, two thirds of the black football and basketball players would have been disqualified and less than twenty percent would have been white athletes. And in August and nineteen eighty six, the Washington Post had said that this rule hits black athletes the hardest. Although the NCAA defends integrity requirements and one of the biggest coaches in NCAA basketball at the time. John Thompson, who coached the Georgetown Hoyas, one of the best basketball teams in the nation, did a protest because of this. Everyone was there, the team was there for both sides, but was not there. He stayed to public boycott to protest this because playing these sports, giving these players a chance to get a degree should not be just about one test, especially one that is biased towards black players. Now, his boycott and protests didn't really do a whole lot to change anything, but the NCAA did have more research. Now, in nineteen ninety two, they adapted Proposition sixteen, which were replaced the hard seven hundred two point zero GPA rule and adjust it for a sliding scale where higher GPAs could offset lower test scores and vice versa. And it also expanded the core courses needed to thirteen, pushing high schools to adjust their curriculums to help these athletes. So the question is did this Proposition forty eight actually work really showing student athletes first, so, did it change things? Yes? Did it have the effect they thought it was? I don't think so. Really, Some teams found loopholes and ways around it. Others built academic support centers sat prep Courtses actually went up a lot because of this, because athletes wanted to be able to get into these programs, and so it made a new industry. Then in the two thousands things started to change. There was actually schools going away from needing tests at all to get into the universities, especially during COVID nineteen era when tests weren't really able to be taken. You still needed a way for students to join your college, and because colleges weren't requiring it, INTAA really couldn't require it either, so they suspended their test requirements in twenty twenty one. And it may be the death of Proposition forty eight. As we've seen with an NIL, the words student and athlete now are kind of non existent. You're an athlete for the school, and I'm sure in the coming years we will see how little these student athletes are actually getting the part as they bounced from school to school, get millions of dollars to represent the school, yes, but also lose out in a lot of different ways. They introduced proposition forty two, which had partial qualifiers that those that meant the GPA, but missed the cutoffs, could receive financial aid, but may have to sit out games. It kind of was a more sliding scale, again adjusting for everyone situation, because everyone's situation is different. You may have not been able to learn because of where you grew up to have the success that you need to in a standard academic community. So the question is did it achieve its purpose? By nineteen ninety four, fifty two percent of the college freshmen would go on to receive degrees. That was up from thirty percent. It rebalanced the academics with the athletic departments, allowing for tutoring and study halls, which is common all over college sports. Now. A review also shows that this just let fewer students in than meant more students for having success. So it's the numbers and the studies show that we don't know. In some ways, I think it being a former college coach and being an academic coordinator, yeah, I can see how it really helped, especially with the academic programs focusing on tutoring and study halls and allowing focused academics for people that struggled in school, maybe not just because of their race and where they grew up, but also because of learning disabilities that they didn't know of back then. So these programs that got in effect on the side because of this. Actually, I do think help and I want to give the NCAA props for this one rule. Even though it may have had racist undertones because of the stereotypes that come with the SAT, it still was one time when the NCAA actually put students ahead of money, because this meant there was going to be less athletes, less success on the field maybe for some of these teams, or less money, but they still passed it. Anyway. It may have not been perfect, but it was a step in the right direction. Sometimes you got to take those little steps. But my question to you is do we even need the NCAA anymore or should we just have these college sports be just sports. I want to thank you for listening to today's daily sports history. It means a lot to me. If you would like to connect with me, you can follow on our socials. We're on Facebook, Instagram, x or Twitter, Blue Sky. Wherever you like to socialize, we're there. You can connect with me, talk to me, give your opinions, give ideas for topics. Love to hear from you, and we'll see you on the next one.