NCAA Scores 4 Out of 50 On Honesty Test

The problem is not that 2012 first-round NFL draft prospect Morris Claiborne couldn't outguess a gerbil on the Wonderlic test. There are several possible explanations for getting a four out of 50, but "he was exhausted from studying calculus" is not one of them.

Claiborne is a genius on the football field and is considered one of the 10 best football players on the planet not yet in the NFL. In order to succeed in his field, he doesn't need to know how to calculate the volume of a prolate spheroid. He doesn't have to know what a prolate spheroid is as long as he can intercept one. He doesn't need to know how to spell prolate spheroid. In fact, Morris Claiborne can make the NFL Hall of Fame without knowing how to spell Morris Claiborne.

What's problematic is that until January, when Claiborne quit school and hired an agent, the NCAA called him a "student athlete." The NCAA endorses a system offering  Morris Claiborne admission to the flagship university of the state of Louisiana when he can't outperform a second-grader on an admissions test. In exchange for three years of brutal bodily self-sacrifice that earned LSU millions of dollars, Claiborne was bequeathed a college education, which is as apt as offering Stephen Hawking a bitchin' pair of Nike Airs.

Morris Claiborne, was in fact, a minor league football player whose only function at LSU was to propel the team to victory and increase its revenue production. The Byzantine NCAA regulations that prevented him from getting paying jobs during school or accepting a free meal from a team benefactor don't change that. The intellectually dishonest TV ads about women's volleyball players and men's fencers graduating and going pro in other careers don't mitigate the foundation of fraud upon which the NCAA is built.

It's hard to imagine that anyone on staff at Morris Claiborne's high school could be unaware of his scholastic ineptitude. Nor could anyone in the LSU athletic department be ignorant of it. Someone, after all, either took Claiborne's SATs for him or somehow rigged the system. (A man who doesn't know the ninth month of the year, can't calculate four times 21, and can't determine whether .8 or .33 is less isn't knocking down an 800 on the SATs without some serious fudging.) And since the scenario is repeated annually with myriad football and basketball players across the nation, the NCAA can hardly be unaware either.

But none of those entities is interested in scholastic aptitude. They are interested in fat profit, the kind people like Morris Claiborne help produce. It's the system that forces Morris Claiborne into college without recompense of any value to him and then blatantly lies about his purpose that is the problem.

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