Teams standings determined by athletes’ academic performance
InsideHigherEd.com—an online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education—released today its own picks for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Bracket and selected Belmont University to make it all the way to the Championship Game. InsideHigherEd.com based its selections in each round by awarding wins to the team with the strongest academic performance using the athletes’ academic standing, enrollment continuity and graduation rates as key factors. Belmont finished this tournament bracket second, behind only Davidson, outscoring such academic power players as Duke, Xavier and Cornell along the way.
Belmont President Dr. Bob Fisher said, “This is what I really love about Belmont’s athletic program: No matter what the scoreboard shows at the end of a competitive contest, we know that we’ve ‘won’ by playing with class, giving our very best, exhibiting good sportsmanship and doing all of this with scholar-athletes who will leave Belmont and make significant contributions to meeting the needs of the world.”
On the heels of its historic third consecutive Atlantic Sun Conference Tournament Championship, Belmont Basketball will face tradition-rich Duke in the first round of the 2008 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. The Bruins and Blue Devils are scheduled to play this Thurs., March 20 from the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. as part of the West Regional bracket. Tip-off time is 6:10 p.m. Central.
The Bruins are led on the court by Senior Justin Hare who is an ESPN The Magazine First Team Academic All-American. For the Fall 2007 semester, every Belmont team, including men’s basketball, held a team GPA average of 3.0 or higher.
Click here to read the full story of how the NCAA Tournament teams match up academically according to InsideHigherEd.com. Click here to read The Tennessean’s coverage of the news.
