In the 'Graduation Gap Bowl,' Black College Athletes and Students Lose

No matter who wins tonight’s College Football Playoff National Championship game between the University of Washington Huskies and the University of Michigan Wolverines, nearly all the schools that were vying for the championship trophy are losers in my annual Graduation Gap Bowl.

I do the Gap Bowl to highlight the exploitation of Black athletes, as too many schools either have abysmal graduation rates for Black players, massive disparities between the graduation rates of Black and white players, or both.

Let’s look at the final four teams for this year’s championship: Washington graduates 85 percent of all students and 76 percent of Black students, but only 47 percent of its original Black football recruits, based on federal data kept by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The University of Texas at Austin graduates 87 percent of all students and 79 percent of all its Black students, but only 49 percent of its original Black football players.

The racial gaps are equally appalling: The 47 percent graduation rate of Black players at Washington is doubled by the 95 percent for white players. The University of Alabama has a gap of 45 percentage points between the 55 percent graduation rate for Black players and 100 percent for white players.

Even the “public-Ivy” Michigan has soiled hands, with a 60 percent graduation rate for Black football players that badly trails the 80 percent for white players and the 93 percent for the entire campus.

This is important because Black men are far more likely than white men to be scholarship athletes at predominantly white universities, yet often far less likely to graduate. I look at federal graduation rates because I believe they best measure a school’s academic commitment to its original recruits and provide an apples-to-apples comparison with regular students.

The NCAA has metrics to boast far higher “graduation success rates,” but those rates mean little in an era in which thousands of players try to transfer from school to school. According to the NCAA’s own data, two of every five players don’t find another school.

Federal rates expose schools such as The University of Georgia, the College Football Playoff national champion the last two years. The university graduates only 20 percent of Black recruits. Other top teams that graduate less than half their original Black freshmen include Liberty University, University of Iowa, University of Tennessee, Louisiana State University, Florida State University, Ohio State University, University of Missouri, Oregon State University, University of Oklahoma and UCLA.

While 53 of the 82 bowl teams graduated at least 75 percent of their original white players, only seven had the same level of excellence for Black recruits: Duke University, Northwestern University, Air Force, Rice University, University of Louisville, Boston College and University of Notre Dame.

A whopping 31 teams had racial gaps of at least 25 percentage points between a lower rate for Black players and a higher rate for white players. The most ridiculous racial gaps of 50 percentage points or more are from Georgia (Black rate, 20/White rate 88), Oklahoma (39/100), Texas Tech (33/88) and Iowa (38/88).

These gaps maintain the narrative that Black men in these schools are not scholars, but cogs in a gear meant to achieve a goal involving athletics.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a former Boston Globe columnist and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary.