Black athletes have launched a legal assault on what they are calling the chronic bias by the NCAA. Last month in federal court in Indianapolis, a lawsuit was filed alleging the governing body of college sports singles out historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for bans from postseason play in Division I, the highest level of competition.

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The class-action suit, filed on behalf of three former and recent HBCU athletes at Savannah State and Howard universities, centers on NCAA rules that say a sports program must maintain about a 50% graduation rate to qualify for postseason tournaments, championships and bowl games. The NCAA imposes that standard on programs regardless of a school’s mission or its resources.

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The standard, along with other NCAA standards going back four decades to Proposition 48’s minimum SAT scores to recruit players, has long proven to penalize Black athletes and HBCUs. As academic scandals prodded more resourced predominantly white institutions (PWIs) to either genuinely educate all their athletes or cynically game the system to maintain eligibility, many HBCUs have been shut out altogether.

Get the latest NCAA basketball news, scores, stats, standings, and more from ESPN. The 2017–18 NCAA Division I men's basketball season began on November 10, 2017. The first tournament was the 2K Sports Classic and the season ended with the Final Four in San Antonio on April 2, 2018. Practices officially began on September 29, 2017. NCAAM Teams All Conferences A 10 ACC ASUN Am. East American Big 12 Big East Big Sky Big South Big Ten Big West C-USA CAA Horizon Ivy MAAC MAC MEAC MVC Mountain West NEC OVC Pac-12 Patriot SEC SWAC. The 2017 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship Game was the final game of the 2017 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament.It determined the national champion for the 2016–17 NCAA Division I men's basketball season.The game was played on April 3, 2017, at University of Phoenix Stadium, now known as State Farm Stadium, in Glendale, Arizona between the Gonzaga Bulldogs. Note: In 1917, 1918, 1943, and 1944, football teams from military training facilities competed alongside college programs note: In 1996, the NCAA eliminated ties with a new overtime system Teams with multiple undefeated seasons. Teams ordered by the number of undefeated seasons in the top division.

HBCUs were born out of segregation and have never enjoyed the resources of a typical public or private PWI. Yet, they maintain a mission to serve students most in need or want of affordable and racially supportive environments, with studies showing that they in fact ultimately graduate higher percentages of African American students when factoring in social and economic backgrounds.

The strain of doing the most with the least constantly has HBCUs on the razor’s edge of eligibility. HBCUs represent only 6% of the 350 schools that compete at Division I. But over the last six years, they have accounted for 82%, or four of every five teams banned by the NCAA for poor academics.

Jessica Meeder, another attorney filing the lawsuit, said, “HBCUs serve the people most at risk of being left behind, and the NCAA is leaving them behind even further.” Another attorney partnering on the lawsuit, Je Yon Jung, said, “People are using the term ‘systemic racism’ a lot but are not really sure what that means. This is an example. How can HBCUs be so few of the teams in Division I and account for so many of the penalties?”

LaRuby May, another attorney in the lawsuit, likened the NCAA’s system to the divide between public hospitals that serve the poorest of the poor and well-endowed private institutions. She should know, as she is also chairwoman of the beleaguered United Medical Center in Washington, which is slated to be shuttered as the city struggles to deliver adequate health care to low-income African Americans.

HBCUs account for so many of the penalties because the NCAA is de facto punishing them for their very mission of supporting Black students, as PWIs treat Black athletes far more as commodities. State public flagships and prestigious private colleges in particular play a two-faced game with Black students. On one hand, selective admissions are a form of suppression, stifling general Black enrollment well under the Black population percentages in the states they serve. Then they turn around and operate majority Black football and basketball factories, pouring infinite resources into keeping players academically eligible.

The disparities are stunning

Take the two teams that played in this week’s national championship. The state of Alabama is 27% Black, but Black enrollment at the University of Alabama is only 11%. Yet in the current NCAA graduation rates report, 70% of its scholarship football and men’s basketball players are Black. The state of Ohio is 13% Black, but Ohio State University is 7.4% Black. Yet 59% of its scholarship football and men’s basketball players are Black.

Alabama boasts 23 people involved with academic support and compliance with NCAA rules. That is nearly eight times more staff involved with those vital tasks than at HBCU Alabama A&M, which had three programs banned from postseason play in 2020-21. Alabama A&M has a mere three staffers for academics and compliance.

Ohio State lists 46 staffers in academic support and compliance. HBCU Prairie View A&M, which had its football team banned from the postseason this season, has only six staffers in the same roles. Even as prestigious Howard University enjoys the glow from producing the nation’s first Black vice president, its football team was banned from bowl games this season. It has just seven academic support and compliance staffers.

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Besides Howard, Prairie View and Alabama A&M, Alabama State, Bethune-Cookman, Coppin State, Delaware State, Grambling and Southern had teams banned for 2020-21 postseason competition for poor academics. The banned HBCU athletic departments have an average of five academic support and compliance staff. The four teams that vied for the national football championship, Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Notre Dame, had an average of 28, more than five times more human resources.

That very same system also lets PWIs off the hook for their disparate education of Black and white athletes. I long supported 50% graduation rates for postseason eligibility in my 25-year-old Graduation Gap Bowl, first for the Boston Globe, and now for The Undefeated. But because of the sordid history of colleges exploiting Black athletes, I also have long insisted that teams at PWIs should still be banned if the Black player graduation rate chronically remains under 50%.

Spending gaps hamper HBCUs, too

That ratio corresponds quite stunningly with the huge gap between PWIs and HBCUs in spending on athletes. The per-athlete spending at the public HBCUs with banned teams ranges from the $28,894 at Alabama A&M to the $52,000 of Prairie View, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics database. The per-athlete spending at national champion Alabama is $255,000. Clemson spends $223,000. Ohio State spends $194,000. In the Associated Press Top 10, per-athlete spending goes as high as $281,000 at Florida and $263,000 at Oklahoma.

The reason is that many schools stay eligible by papering over low graduation rates of Black players with perfect or nearly perfect graduation rates for white players. For instance, Louisiana Tech played in the New Orleans Bowl last month with a Graduation Success Rate of 45% for Black players and 90% for white players.

Of the 58 bowl teams, 22 had racial graduation rate gaps of at least 20 percentage points. In what I have labeled the NCAA’s “Three-Fifths Compromise,” harkening back to when the South was allowed to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person to boost representation in Congress, many teams graduate about 60% of their Black players while graduating nearly all of their white players. Besides the 45-point percentage gap of Louisiana Tech, teams with at least 30 percentage-point gaps were Ohio State, Army, Houston, Miami, Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia and San Jose State.

All the while, HBCU teams, which are 43 times more likely to be banned from postseason play than a PWI, according to the lawsuit, are compromised, with individual athletes harmed in the process. In the lawsuit, former Savannah State basketball players Troyce Manassa and Austin Dasent and J’TA Freeman, a member of the 2020 Howard University women’s lacrosse team, say they were blindsided by the bans. As postseason bans limit a program’s publicity and revenues, the suit alleges that they also damage student-athletes’ visibility to either continue their sport professionally or go into sports-related careers, such as becoming a coach or trainer.

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Manassa was the 2017 senior team captain at Savannah State when his team was banned from postseason play. He told NPR that not being able to finish his college career on the big stage “caused me a lot of emotional distress.” The lawsuit asks for compensation for athletes on such banned teams along with an end to the current academic progress system for all colleges.

It would be a welcome end, both to get HBCUs out of a discriminatory doghouse and to unleash the dogs on PWIs that in broad daylight value Black bodies more for profit on the field and court than for their intellect in the classroom. Meeder said, “When you see the data that an HBCU is 43 times more likely to be penalized, this is not about education. It’s about pretext.” It is pretext for the PWIs to get away with systemic exploitation.

As the University of North Carolina’s men’s basketball team began celebrating its 2017 NCAA championship on an elevated hardwood floor, Theo Pinson was temporarily down below enjoying long-awaited tears of joy with his equally emotional parents near the stands.

“I just told them I loved them and [reminded] them that I told them we were going to win,” Pinson said after North Carolina’s 71-65 win over Gonzaga on Monday night.

Said Pinson Sr. to The Undefeated: “He is going to be in the rafters as a member of a champion for life, no matter what. For life. And to be a Tar Heels champion for life, you’re on top of the world.”

The road to becoming a “Tar Heels champion for life” was a painful one for Pinson.

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Pinson earned third-team USA Today All-America honors as a senior in 2014 while playing for Wesleyan Christian Academy in High Point, North Carolina. The 6-foot-6 guard played in the top three prep All-Star games his senior year: the McDonald’s All-American Game, the Nike Hoop Summit and the Jordan Brand Classic. The Mr. Basketball of North Carolina was ranked as the 10th best high school player in the Class of 2014. He signed with the Tar Heels over Duke, Indiana, Georgetown and Louisville.

“One of the reasons why he came to Carolina is because he loves that family love,” Pinson Sr. said.

Lost in the hoopla of Pinson’s high school career was that he also broke the fifth metatarsal bone in his left foot. The foot problems continued in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as he missed 14 games as a freshman after breaking that same bone in his left foot on Jan. 21, 2015, at Wake Forest, and he didn’t play in the 2015 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament after aggravating it. He was injury-free in a sophomore season in which he averaged 4.5 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.9 assists per game. The foot woes returned last October, and this time it was the right foot, as Pinson broke the fifth metatarsal bone and missed the first 16 games of the 2016-17 season.

Pinson made his season debut on Jan. 8, going scoreless with five rebounds and five assists against North Carolina State. He averaged 6.2 points, 5.2 rebounds and 3.3 assists in six games before reinjuring his right foot on Jan. 26 against Virginia Tech.

“The second time I got hurt I didn’t know if I was going to play the rest of the season,” Pinson said. “I called [my parents] and was like, ‘I hope I can compete with this team because I know we can win a national championship.’ I didn’t want to let them down. I knew I could help out. They told me to ‘just stay positive. You don’t know what the results are …’ They kept my head up, and look at me now.”

Pinson Sr. described that time as “rock bottom” because they didn’t know how bad the injury was initially. He gave some motivational words and tough love daily to push his son.

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“It was tough, man. It was just another injury,” Pinson Sr. said. “He said, ‘I can’t do it no more. I’ve been through this three times already.’ He said, ‘I need help getting through this one.’ I would be on the phone telling him to ‘man up. We’re going to get through it.’ I asked God to help us get through it. We went through it together.”

Along with his parents’ daily support, Pinson said, he fought through his injuries with toughness, weightlifting and a great Tar Heels athletic training staff. He returned from injury against Duke on Feb. 9 and did not miss a game the rest of the season.

With a reputation as an energy guy who makes others better, Pinson started at forward for North Carolina in the championship game Monday night.

“I’ve got to give them more credit than anybody for getting me back out there and keeping me healthy,” Pinson said.

As bad as the foot pain was, Pinson suffered the worst pain of his college basketball career when the Tar Heels lost in the 2016 NCAA championship game to Villanova in nightmarish fashion.

With Pinson watching helplessly from the bench, Villanova guard Kris Jenkins made a game-winning shot at the buzzer to keep the Tar Heels from winning their first championship since 2009. This was after North Carolina guard Marcus Paige hit a 3-pointer to tie the game at 74 with 4.7 seconds remaining. Pinson recalled Villanova’s championship confetti falling on him as he departed from the floor in defeat. There was also a picture of him sitting in the locker room afterward with his head down that he used as a screen saver on his cellphone as a motivating reminder of the devastating loss.

“I don’t remember nothing right now,” Pinson said of the 2016 NCAA championship game.

Gonzaga entered Monday’s game with a 37-1 record and quite capable of giving North Carolina a second consecutive title-game defeat. Before heading to the championship game, Pinson took a phone call from his parents, who offered words of wisdom and good luck.

“I told him before the game, ‘Win or lose, son, I’m proud of you because you’ve carried yourself respectable as a man. You’ve upheld the university and all this good stuff. I’m proud of you, son. Go and enjoy,’” Pinson Sr. said.

Pinson also had some words for his parents before he got off the phone.

“They told me that no matter what, stay positive and keep your head up,” he said. “I told them, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re going to win some games.’ ”

The Bulldogs entered halftime with a 35-32 lead and the momentum. Pinson said North Carolina coach Roy Williams told the players at halftime that if they “want to be a champion, it’s going to be a dogfight.” The Tar Heels responded to their coach by outscoring the Bulldogs 39-30 in the second half. North Carolina made the necessary defensive plays down the stretch during the foul-plagued game to claim redemption. Pinson described the title game as “ugly” and par for the course for how the Tar Heels won en route to their title.

As the clock started ticking down, Pinson started crying tears of joy after he saw Gonzaga guard Nigel Williams-Goss shed tears of pain. And once the buzzer finally sounded, Pinson tossed the ball high into the air in the mammoth University of Phoenix Stadium in celebration.

“It’s amazing to throw the ball up in the air. That’s it. There is nothing else better than that, I promise you,” Pinson said.

Pinson had six points, nine rebounds, two assists, one steal and one block in 30 minutes. The communication major also was much-needed comic relief for his Tar Heels teammates before the game.

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“He’s the energy buzzer,” North Carolina assistant coach Steve Robinson told The Undefeated. “All day today I felt that he was trying to keep everybody loose on purpose, from this morning at breakfast. He has this voice about him that everybody loves. When you come up here, he brings a smile to your face.

“The injuries have been unfortunate for him. But he’s bounced back and we’ve finally been able to keep him on the court. I still don’t think we’ve seen the best of Theo Pinson as a player yet, but we’ll keep working and try to get him there.”

The Tar Heels won the sixth national title for the University of North Carolina. The new banner will join the others before next season in the rafters of the Dean Smith Center after an eight-year drought. Pinson, a North Carolina native, knows just how special it is to be in that rare championship class for the storied program.

“All the former guys were saying, ‘Just pull up a chair to the table,’ ” Pinson said. “We wanted to pull up a chair. I told [ex-Tar Heels forward] Sean May to clean my chair off and have it ready for me when I come to the table.”

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Pinson’s mom filmed a precious moment on her iPad between father and son. Both wearing North Carolina No. 1 jerseys with the name Pinson printed on the back, they cried and hugged while the champion kept hitting his fist on his dad’s back and told him twice, “I told you we were going to win.” As his son ran back onto the floor to celebrate with his teammates, Pinson Sr. held his right fist in the air in a much-needed celebration after so much disappointment.

Pinson said he will “never forget” the feeling of embracing his dad after winning a championship. Neither will his pops.

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“That showed me the love he has,” Pinson Sr. said. “He knows that I’m here, his mom is here and his family is here. … This is one of the biggest moments of our lives, for him though, not me. Son, you don’t have to do anything for me. I’m already happy.”