Alexander Wolff: Brand Leaves Legacy of Integrity

Brand’s legacy will be to have ended forever the practice of paying mere lip service to academic performance. He championed measurable progress with the introduction of the Academic Progress Rate, or APR. Now schools pay a real price — in lost scholarships, scaled-back practice time and, potentially, postseason exclusion — if their athletes fail to make their way toward degrees. To be sure, big-time basketball and football are as addled as ever by the scourges of extra benefits and middlemen. And progress on football APRs seems to have stalled out of late, even if briefly. But basketball APRs are up over the past seven years, from 55 percent to 65 percent.

Indeed, within the next several years, the NCAA won’t just be reporting APRs by school and sport. The “Two-Ay,” as members of the clipboard carriers’ guild call that organization, will hang an APR on every coach. Think of it: Each Armani-wrapped sideline preener, and headset-sprouting screamer, tagged “Branded,” you could say — with an irrefutable metric signaling his commitment to academic seriousness, or lack thereof.

If parents or high school coaches still choose to send a kid off to play for some shyster with a lousy APR, it’ll be their own damn fault.

Even at Indiana — where police had to evacuate Brand and his wife from their residence on campus, as he was burned in effigy on their front lawn in the aftermath of Knight’s firing — there’s real pride at the story Brand wrote with the last chapter of his life. The school awarded him an honorary degree in March.

Myles Brand did two things not considered imaginable during the 20th Century: Bring an out-of-control Bob Knight to heel, and hold schools accountable for poor academic performance in revenue-producing sports. Those two achievements will stand as a fine opening act for college sports’ 21st Century.