Last week, the NCAA Board of Directors announced that the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament field would expand to 68 teams from the current 65 for next March’s tournament, pending the approval of the body’s men’s basketball committee.

While the airwaves and Internet sports blogs were abuzz with talk of the expansion and its repercussions, another announcement from the Board was buried in the media whirlwind – a recommendation to require football players to complete nine units during the fall semester (i.e. during the season) in order to remain eligible for the next season.

At first glance, this may seem like a sensible proposal. As the NCAA and its two big sports, football and men’s basketball, have become more and more like big-money enterprises, the idea of the “student-athlete” has fallen by the wayside to a significant degree. Requiring a certain amount of coursework from players can only be a good thing, right?

That’s actually wrong, as it turns out. No matter which way you look at it, a nine-unit requirement simply can’t say anything good about the NCAA.

Let’s start with the fact that most colleges have minimum per-semester (or per-quarter) unit requirements that are already higher than the proposed NCAA floor. As some of you may know, Stanford students must take at least 12 units per quarter to remain enrolled full-time – athletic teams, including the football team during fall quarter, are not exempt from this requirement.

Other schools maintain similar minimum per-semester credit requirements. Cal requires 12 or 13 units per quarter based on major and Notre Dame requires 12 per semester. Even Nebraska requires 12 units – most colleges have a floor of around 12 units in place.

This fact makes the NCAA recommendation for nine credits extremely puzzling, and all possible explanations look pretty bad (at least in my opinion) for the organization.

The first potential rationale is fairly straightforward: with its academic credibility in tatters, the NCAA needs some way to make it seem like it still cares about whether or not its athletes actually learn anything while in college.

A requirement that does exactly nothing to change the status quo accomplishes this purpose quite well. When confronted with allegations that it doesn’t care about academics for football players, the organization can point to this requirement as evidence that it is trying to promote learning as much as possible. However, when the proposal doesn’t actually do anything, it turns into a pure public relations stunt that can enhance the NCAA’s reputation without meeting any resistance from its member schools.

While this motivation is pretty bad, the other two explanations I can think of are even more sinister.

The NCAA could be instituting this requirement as a way to impose outside controls on powerful athletic departments that have found ways to circumvent the minimum-unit requirements of their respective universities. At some schools, the athletic department is often one of the more influential players in determining policy, and it can use this clout to ensure that football players and other varsity athletes are exempt from requirements to take a certain number of units.

It is easy to see why such a policy would be in the interest of football programs. Their players are usually on scholarship, which means that taking one class in a semester doesn’t result in wasted tuition money for the player; less time taking classes means more time to focus on football and ensures a better chance of success in those classes; and programs are not required to graduate their athletes, so taking fewer units isn’t a problem since players don’t plan to graduate in four years anyway.

To its credit, such a situation would lend merit to the NCAA’s implementation of a nine-unit minimum. However, the existence of a systemic circumvention of minimum academic requirements at a number of institutions is very worrying (though, thankfully, Stanford’s programs don’t engage in any such chicanery).

The last possible explanation is, to me, by far the worst one: the NCAA is subtly signaling to schools that its expectations for football players now stand at very low levels.

If the NCAA only asks for nine units, athletic departments could use that as a weapon to get reduced units for their players. As said already, having athletes go to class less benefits the program in a myriad of ways without really hurting it at all. In this scenario, both schools and the NCAA are colluding to reduce academic participation. While I’ll admit that this scenario is unlikely at best, it must be considered given the lack of transparency with which the NCAA’s Board of Directors has made this recommendation.

Though I’m sure some people will disagree with me, my main contention with this recommendation is that I see no way in which it is academically beneficial. Putting a minimum under already existing ones is at best a completely useless provision; at worst, it can undercut the very system it seems designed to enhance.

Kabir Sawhney is taking nine units this quarter. Ask him what it’s like at [email protected].