Rashad McCants Is Now Redefining His Strength and Mental Fitness After Basketball
For Rashad McCants, the gym has never just been about building muscle—it’s been about building resilience. After his time as professional basketball player came to a close, McCants didn’t spiral—he recalibrated. In the weightroom, he found clarity. The repetition of each rep served as a reminder: strength is something you earn each day. What began as a competitive edge in his youth has…
At one time the N.F.L.’s highest-paid defensive player, he left the league after six seasons and fell into a spiral of addiction, homelessness and desolation.
Rashad McCants Represents a Bigger Higher Education Problem
Today, ESPN reported Rashad McCants claims he had tutors write his term papers, he rarely went to class at UNC and he remained able to play because “he took bogus classes designed to keep athletes academically eligible.”
If these accounts are true, it adds to recent laundry list of the institutions’ failings. What I’m more interested in, however, are McCants’ telling expectations of college as a student-athlete.
It gets worse:
"You're there to make revenue for the college. You're there to put fans in the seats. You're there to bring prestige to the university by winning games."
In 2014, this is a reality and a collective failure by a number of institutions. We can point fingers at coaches and BCS universities – but let’s start at the top: the NCAA and, to a lesser degree, the NBA.
In the 90s and early aughts, rebellious teen basketball stars chose to skip attending college and jump straight to playing professionally. In pretty much every other profession, this is acceptable. You’re an art protégé and want to start making bank at age 18? Sure!
But not basketball. The NCAA was losing out on selling LeBron’s face in exchange for lucrative television and sponsorship deals. It would be like McDonalds’ forgoing the McRib and just promoting five-piece chicken nuggets - aka the Wisconsin Badgers.
So, in 2005, the NBA ruled a player must have spent a year out of high school and be 19 years old to be eligible for the NBA Draft. It effectively forced a player to attend college for a year with little to no incentive to stay after that allotted time. The deal helped the NCAA add assets mislabeled as students.
Let’s remember this is college basketball we’re talking about, which is relative small stakes. Basketball brings in roughly $300,000 in revenue to major universities. Football, neigh, FOOTBALL, brought $95 million to the University of Texas in 2012.
Bottom line: the university has a huge incentive for keeping these worker bees on the court to slam-dunk honey into their tenure pool. Even still, is the university responsible for the academic success – or lack thereof - of their football and basketball scholarship students, particularly given 98% of whom will not be drafted in NBA or NFL?
One 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education says yes. The paper, titled “Black Male Student-Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division I College Sports,” argues these institutions in particular are not doing enough to ensure black football and basketball student-athletes graduate at a rate of their peers.
A 12-person advisory committee contributed to the report, including one Cricket Lane, Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That’s important for the McCants point, as well as the fact that UNC has the 12th largest gap between the percentage of athletes that are black men and the overall percentage of students that are black men.
The executive summary states that it is “astonishing to us that it seems the American public (including former Black student-athletes, sports enthusiasts, journalists, and leaders in Black communities) has accepted as normal the widespread inequities that are cyclically reproduced in most revenue-generating college sports programs.”
This is fair, by the numbers. The NCAA will tell you African-American men’s basketball players graduated at a 68 percent rate – the highest ever. But that takes into account every NCAA university. At the major revenue-generating schools, the numbers are much worse. In the ACC, only two schools bettered that 68 percent threshold:
More numbers indicate black student athletes are falling behind their black student peers:
And, more troubling, these students are falling way behind their undergraduate peers:
Further in the report, Kenneth L. Shropshire, J.D. accidentally opens up Pandora’s box for appropriate finger-pointing:
“Are these racial inequities in college completion best explained by Black men’s fascination with playing for the NFL and NBA, or is it that coaches only care if these students are academically eligible for athletic competition but are considerably less concerned about rates at which they graduate? Which is right, which is wrong?”
Well…what if both are right – and ultimately, both are detrimental? We already know that major universities have an incentive to keep players academically eligible, but the very nature of that bar-setting encourages mediocrity, not necessarily knowledge retention; you’re there to “pass,” not have the skills to land a career.
Let’s revisit McCants, who claimed the university gave him a “paper class” alternative. This concept of a class that does not require attendance and only requires a term paper to be graded at the end of the semester BLOWS PEOPLES MINDS. How can this work?!
It turns out I actually took three such English classes in Manchester during my study abroad program. I wasn’t required to attend class and I knew the works that would discussed in advance. I had one paper and one exam each. No quizzes, no homework, as is the norm in many higher education systems around the globe. I loved the subjects in this scenario, attended every class and aced the finals. You didn’t have to make me be there because I enjoyed learning and appreciated the costs and opportunity to be there.
I would contend then, McCant’s supposed easy path through academia is equally the fault of the university for offering this alternative as it is his own for accepting. It’s easier to blame the institution that holds your hand at the crosswalk than ask why that hand needs holding – and there are many reasons for this outside of the full-time commitments of student-athletes.
One of the major problems is that our society views high education as an extension of high school. It’s an automatic next step for success. At high school graduation we announce the plans of each student as long as that plan is the name of a university. This should stop. What of our aforementioned art protégé who jumps right into the labor force? She gets no accolade at graduation. But the football player who goes to a state college on scholarship and has a coin flip odds of getting a degree? Congrats to you, sir!
I’m not smart enough to know the answer for what the NCAA should do with its student athletes, if they should pay them or not. I do know there are smarter ways we can tackle the vast expenditure of attending college. It starts with better preparation from the institution – building transparent programs that develop skills for specific career opportunities. For instance, a quick glance at the numbers shows we need to encourage more engineers, which account for the number one most-sought major by employers.
Students should have better access to, and be more willing to accept, the fact that a passion may not make financial sense. Alternately, if a dance student is a bona fide rockstar, she should graduate with a success plan. Let’s bring in people who have done what you want to do, let’s project where the job market is and will be and let’s give you five career alternates for which you can transfer these skills. That’s a start, at least.
Proper goal setting should also be improved from within the home. For athletes, it should be the shared responsibility of the player, coach, parent and institution to balance expectations of the student and of the athlete. It pains me most of all when the parents fail.
I coached a basketball team of 8-10 year olds this past winter. My assistant coach berated the players as often as possible and was particularly hard on his (black) son. After one game, my girlfriend overheard him tell his son, essentially, if he didn’t take basketball more seriously, he wouldn’t attend college. That’s the pressure he faced at age eight. For many black males, this is a reality.
Clearly the academic success of male black athletes deserves our attention. If we’re not going to improve as students and we’re not going to improve as parents (my preference), institutions of higher education take on the burden of being a better influence. We must treat this as a shared responsibility and yes, it's irresponsible for a student to blame his academic failures on the university and his coach. But to simply pander McCants as a snitch or a liar sidesteps a conversation of real consequence.
