MORGANTOWN - It could have been worse, right?

On the heels of every other bit of bad publicity West Virginia has gotten in the past year - some deserved, some not so much - the timing of the revelation that three of the school's athletic teams will lose scholarships because of academic progress deficiencies wasn't good.

Let's see, the school is embroiled in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against its former football coach, the president is under pressure to resign in the wake of the awarding of a bogus degree to the governor's daughter and the same prez is going over the athletic department to cut a back-door contract deal with the basketball coach so as to spruce up his own image.

Did we miss anything? Oh, right, the former basketball coach is cutting $300,000 checks to the school under protest and reserving his right to contest the payments, presumably until he sees how the case of the former football coach turns out. And, in case you missed it, the former soccer coach was recently rebuffed by the NCAA when he appealed a finding that he repeatedly violated NCAA rules and engaged in unethical conduct while employed by the university.

Meanwhile, most of the actual athletic teams do nothing but win, win some more and then win again under these clouds of administrative skullduggery, which is cause for either unqualified praise or even more skepticism.

Given that none of these issues is the type that would give any of those teams any sort of competitive advantage - in fact, the reality is that they have overcome, not benefited from the loss of coaches and the dark cloud that seems more pervasive every day - we would tend to believe that praise is in order.

The latest problem, though, is not easily dismissed. Sure, there are extenuating circumstances regarding the loss of scholarships in three sports. The penalties were relatively minor, too, as were the sports involved. Football and basketball are doing just fine, thank you. Meanwhile, women's rowing, men's soccer and wrestling are falling short.

Women's rowing? Really?

What's alarming is not so much that those three sports were hit with scholarship sanctions, but that the school was unable to prevent it. You can't tell me that West Virginia's rowing team - or the men's soccer or wrestling teams, for that matter - are examples of academic underachievement while 63 of the 65 BCS-level football programs are all perfectly up to snuff.

Or 60 of the 65 men's basketball programs at those same schools.

Or 64 of the 65 women's basketball programs, or 63 of the 65 baseball teams.

In fact, every men's soccer team among those 65 BCS level schools made the grade. Except West Virginia's.

Every wrestling team made the NCAA's 925 Academic Performance Rating (APR) cutoff. Except West Virginia and North Carolina State.

Every women's rowing team (crew ) was OK. Except West Virginia's.

On the heels of every other bit of bad publicity West Virginia has gotten in the past year - some deserved, some not so much - the timing of the revelation that three of the school's athletic teams will lose scholarships because of academic progress deficiencies wasn't good.

Let's see, the school is embroiled in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against its former football coach, the president is under pressure to resign in the wake of the awarding of a bogus degree to the governor's daughter and the same prez is going over the athletic department to cut a back-door contract deal with the basketball coach so as to spruce up his own image.

Did we miss anything? Oh, right, the former basketball coach is cutting $300,000 checks to the school under protest and reserving his right to contest the payments, presumably until he sees how the case of the former football coach turns out. And, in case you missed it, the former soccer coach was recently rebuffed by the NCAA when he appealed a finding that he repeatedly violated NCAA rules and engaged in unethical conduct while employed by the university.

Meanwhile, most of the actual athletic teams do nothing but win, win some more and then win again under these clouds of administrative skullduggery, which is cause for either unqualified praise or even more skepticism.

Given that none of these issues is the type that would give any of those teams any sort of competitive advantage - in fact, the reality is that they have overcome, not benefited from the loss of coaches and the dark cloud that seems more pervasive every day - we would tend to believe that praise is in order.

The latest problem, though, is not easily dismissed. Sure, there are extenuating circumstances regarding the loss of scholarships in three sports. The penalties were relatively minor, too, as were the sports involved. Football and basketball are doing just fine, thank you. Meanwhile, women's rowing, men's soccer and wrestling are falling short.

Women's rowing? Really?

What's alarming is not so much that those three sports were hit with scholarship sanctions, but that the school was unable to prevent it. You can't tell me that West Virginia's rowing team - or the men's soccer or wrestling teams, for that matter - are examples of academic underachievement while 63 of the 65 BCS-level football programs are all perfectly up to snuff.

Or 60 of the 65 men's basketball programs at those same schools.

Or 64 of the 65 women's basketball programs, or 63 of the 65 baseball teams.

In fact, every men's soccer team among those 65 BCS level schools made the grade. Except West Virginia's.

Every wrestling team made the NCAA's 925 Academic Performance Rating (APR) cutoff. Except West Virginia and North Carolina State.

Every women's rowing team (crew ) was OK. Except West Virginia's.

Shoot, the average national APR for women's rowing (985) was the highest of any sport, men or women. One school was deemed deficient enough to warrant the loss of scholarships. West Virginia.

Of those 65 BCS-level schools, only 12 were hit with scholarship reductions. Ten suffered the fate in a single sport ranging from men's basketball (Kansas State, Purdue, South Carolina and Southern Cal) and football (Kansas and Washington State) to baseball (LSU), men's track (Arizona), wrestling (N.C. State) and women's basketball (Oklahoma State).

Only two of those 65 schools were assessed scholarship reductions in multiple sports - Tennessee (men's basketball, men's swimming and baseball) and West Virginia.

Now, to reduce this to a simple explanation is impossible because this thing has multiple levels. But there seem to be two basic questions.

First, are the athletes in those three sports at West Virginia just academically deficient or has bad luck (primarily in the form of transfers) conspired to deal a blow at a bad time, just as the NCAA got its APR up and running?

And second, if you are of the belief that learning to play the APR game is nearly as vital as actual academic progress is in this equation, could it be that West Virginia and Tennessee just haven't yet mastered the art?

(An idealist might argue a third possibility, that in the absence of a plan to circumvent the rules those two schools are actually to be admired for their truthfulness. The risk of sounding exceptionally naïve prevents us from going there.)

The truth, of course, probably rests somewhere in the middle. At the risk of sounding too simplistic or stereotypical, I think it's probably safe to dismiss the notion that West Virginia is recruiting athletes who are either ill prepared or uninterested in the student side of being a student-athlete. Were we talking about football or men's basketball at almost any school in the country, that might be a reasonable argument to at least explore. But wrestling? Soccer? Women's crew?

Honey, you have to put more of an effort into this classwork.

Get off my back. I'm here to row, not study.

For West Virginia's part, the explanations are pretty simple, and they sound perfectly valid. In the case of soccer and crew, coaching changes occurred that led student-athletes to transfer and those were counted against the teams in the APR. In the case of wrestling, it was an instance of trying to give an ineligible athlete a scholarship that backfired.

Certainly it's not quite as simple as that, but the point is that amid all its other problems the school can't afford the black eye that this one presents, being one of only two BCS schools with multiple teams penalized for academic shortcomings. It's all well and good that officials say they feel like the problems have been corrected, but given the shaky reputation the university has right now, learning how to play this game is as important as any other.

To contact staff writer Dave Hickman, call 348-1734 or send e-mail to dphickm...@aol.com.