March Madness is all about the hoops, but these players are also A-plus in the classroom

BOSTON — Amid the madness and deep in the dance, a revolutionary proposal hovers over the NCAA Tournament and all of big-time university athletics. Amazingly, it has advanced far enough for people to be talking about it out loud. It is the radical suggestion that college athletes be rewarded for being college students.

Nothing is official, but the plan has enough legs so far to make you think. And what’s more appropriate for college than thinking? The suggestion being floated is that an athlete who transfers from one school to another will no longer have to sit out a year, as long as his or her grade point average is at or above a certain level.

This sounds like a nice antidote to the inequity of making athletes wait a year while coaches are free to roam from college to college, from sea to shining sea. It also sounds like a new controversy in the making, with the possibility of coaches hoping their players get lower grades.

“How will people try to stay within the rules but maneuver? Will you put your kids in harder courses? I don’t know,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said recently.

Good question. But from this particular soap box, the fact that anybody is talking about schoolwork at all is a great thing. Personally, I get a little leery of stories that lionize players for spending every spare moment in the gym. Shouldn’t they find their way to the library? Maybe the true Big Dance is the tricky two-step between basketball and academics, especially with the one-and-done players who are just marking time until they can reach the NBA. There also is the tacit understanding that athletes can be used as de facto college fundraisers, attracting donations and applications with their fame. Then there was the (unfortunately unpunished) revelation last fall that national champion North Carolina has been running scam courses for years.

In that context, I am happy to report that there are stellar players who can pass a test as well as they can pass the ball. The point guard matchup in the West Virginia-Villanova game Friday night was a delicious example.

West Virginia’s Jevon Carter heads the academic All-America team chosen by CoSIDA, the sports information directors organization. The sport management major has a 3.51 GPA. His former AAU teammate, Jalen Brunson of Villanova, pulled off the rare quinella of being named the Big East player of the year and winning the conference’s athlete-scholar award. Granted, the “athlete” part gets the hearty share in an award like that — you never see it going to a bench-warmer who dominates in molecular biology — but it is a nice honor.

“It means a lot,” said Brunson, a communications major with a 3.34 GPA and is on track to graduate in three years. “It shows dedication on and off the court. A lot of time commitments and I still get all my work done. It’s a credit to my parents, making sure I was raised the right way.”

His coach, Jay Wright, said, “The fact that there are those guys should be celebrated. He does talk about what he’s going to do after he’s finished playing basketball. He does talk about his classes. He’s the most mature guy in our program, including me.”

It was quite cool to hear Alabama freshmen Collin Sexton and Herbert Jones say last week that they are competing to see if they can both keep up their perfect 4.0 averages. “My siblings, they got their degrees, so I want to get mine, too,” said Sexton, a potential one-and-done in terms of his basketball eligibility.

Duke freshman power forward Wendell Carter Jr., who had a big role in his team’s win over Syracuse Friday night, actually had considered attending Harvard. His parents never let him play ball unless he had straight A’s. He does attend school. In fact, he said, “I’m taking this one class called Sexual Pleasures.”

Someone naturally had to ask him what the homework is like. He laughed and said, “It’s not about actual sexual pleasure, it’s about how people’s thought processes are, in terms of what they’re attracted to. I don’t think that’s the correct name for that class.”

So, not everything is what it seems. Live and learn, which is part of college and, at least sometimes, of college basketball.