Coach Mike Montgomery had a game plan. As his men's basketball squad began the NCAA tournament, Montgomery knew there was only one way to stage a repeat appearance in the Final Four: control the tempo of the games and defend aggressively against three-point shooters. Here at the magazine we had our own game plan as we approached deadline for this issue. If the basketball team lost in the early rounds of the national tournament, we would do a one- to two-page story on the season in Farm Report. If the players went to the Final Four, we'd bump it up to a four-page feature. And if the Cardinal won it all? Cover story.
Our article, alas, can be found in Farm Report, on page 38. It so happens that I watched what turned out to be the final game of the season with some old friends at The Old Pro's, the well-worn sports bar on El Camino. Most of the 26 televisions there were tuned to the tournament game between heavily favored Stanford and little-known Gonzaga University. When the Cardinal finished short, a pall of March Sadness came over the place.
Driving home that Saturday afternoon, I tuned to the postgame radio show. Amid the stats and facts, Bob Murphy, '53, took time to discuss each of the five seniors on the team. "Most of them probably will never play at this serious level again," said Murph, the voice of Stanford basketball (and football). "But they'll all graduate in June," noted on-air partner John Platz, '83, JD/MBA '89. It was a theme sounded even by those who aren't unabashed Stanford boosters. In a column two days later, Mark Simon of the San Francisco Chronicle marveled at the team's graduation rate. "Stanford basketball is exactly what collegiate athletics is supposed to be," he wrote.
This, I realized, is a side of the story we might have explored in that longer piece. Consider Montgomery's impressive off-the-court numbers: in the 13 years since he became basketball coach, every one of his players has graduated. By contrast, the rate of graduation for men's basketball players at all NCAA Division I schools is an anemic 43 percent. (Under the NCAA definition, a student has six years to finish his degree.) So how does Montgomery do it? It's not him, he says. It's the students. "They come here to play basketball and go to school. They do a great job of managing their time." After a road trip, Montgomery notes, everyone's tired. "It's awfully easy to tilt back and sleep on a plane, but they'll knock off three chapters."
They do get some help from the athletics department, which provides tutors after practice and laptops and hotel study halls when the team travels. The players are grateful -- especially for the computers. "I'm constantly working on some paper on the road -- not just in the hotel but on the plane, on the bus from the hotel to the airport, anytime I can steal a few minutes," says senior Kris Weems, a sociology major who is considering a career in college sports administration. But concentrating on schoolwork can be difficult with all those distractions. "I brought my backpack along on every road trip, but it's tough to juggle it when you're in a hotel and out of the academic routine," says senior Tim Young, an English major who hopes to play pro basketball and then settle into a career teaching high school English.
Mark Seaton remembers an "academic disaster" from his sophomore year. The team was in North Carolina for an NCAA tournament game scheduled during winter-quarter finals. Seaton had taken a computer science exam on the road and was trying to fax it to his professor. But the hotel fax wasn't working. "I was panicking," says Seaton. "It was going to be late." He eventually got an assist from team marketing director Jamie Zaninovich, who transmitted the final from the fax modem on his computer. ("It's not like he wrote the paper for me," says Seaton, who may have been reading about athletics scandals at other schools. "He just helped me send it.") A year later, the team was in St. Louis for the sectionals of the national tournament. "The NCAA set up this designated media period where we had to be available, but I had to take a final two hours later," recalls Seaton. "So I'm trying to study, and all these reporters are bothering me."
For Seaton, an economics major who graduates in June and starts working at a San Francisco investment bank in July, playing basketball was something he did when he wasn't studying. Not the other way around.
You can send e-mail to Bob at bobcohn@stanford.edu
