Since the day Bob Huggins was hired to coach the Cincinnati basketball team, graduation rates have been one of the biggest hot-button issues in college sports.

After all, what better way to fill the sports pages than with stories about how these athletes ÷ especially basketball players ÷ are simply "using" colleges as a minor-league pit stop for the pros? The entire dialogue was laced with latent racism, because graduation rates had been a problem in collegiate baseball for years. As soon as the vast majority of student athletes leaving early became football and basketball players ÷ and were predominantly black ÷ it became a problem that might eventually destroy college sports, if not the world, if one believed what was said.

And, of course, it's all a bunch of crap. But the story never seems to get tired in the eyes of journalists and editors bent on making a social commentary out of a phenomenon that takes place not only with student athletes, but students in general.

So it's not surprising that the front page of yesterday's Tucson Citizen was graced with a story about UA's student-athlete graduation rate (44 percent), and how it's lower than the NCAA average (60 percent).

To top it off, the men's basketball team has a zero percent graduation rate.

Yes, zero.

The story goes on to point out that the rate is for the 1995-96 freshman class only, and the incoming class for the basketball team was only three players. No mention of the averages over the past 5, 10 or 20 years, and no deeper look at the graduation rate for the basketball program since Olson has been in charge.

There are also a lot of other factors involved in the low rate. Transfers, even if they graduate at the school they move to, are counted as non-graduates. Athletes who drop out of school to pursue a professional career are counted as non-graduates, as are athletes who drop out for personal reasons other than grades.

But in these cases, what's not looked at is the student's academic standing at the time of departure. According to associate head basketball coach Jim Rosborough, during his 13 years at UA there have only been two players that have left school because they lost their academic eligibility. Other than that, every player who hasn't graduated did so with qualifying marks and was on pace to graduate in the six years allotted by the NCAA. So when Rosborough heard that the Citizen presented the story in the manner it did, he was a little angry, to say the least.

"If they said that, they are stupid," Rosborough said.

He said two of the three players representing the basketball program for that year ÷ Jason Terry and A.J. Bramlett ÷ went on to be drafted into the NBA after their senior season, and that one of them was only a class short of getting his diploma, though he couldn't say who.

He also said that since he's been here, the program has graduated more than