The Invalidated SAT Score Behind Memphis’s Vacated Season

Derrick Rose played all 40 games of Memphis’s 2007–08 basketball season, a run that ended with an overtime loss to Kansas in the national championship game. In August 2009, the NCAA ordered Memphis to vacate its 38 wins. The score invalidation—not a finding that someone had taken the test for Rose—made the player ineligible under NCAA rules.

The case drew together several distinct questions about Rose’s path from Chicago’s Simeon High School to Memphis. One concerned his high-school transcript. In a May 29, 2009, investigation, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that a teacher had given Rose a D in the last semester of his senior year, but the transcript Memphis received showed a C.

Reporters Michael O’Brien and Rosalind Rossi, citing unnamed sources, identified Rose as one of four Simeon basketball players whose grades were temporarily raised after graduation, long enough to appear on transcripts sent to colleges. The grade changes were described in a Chicago Public Schools inspector general’s report that did not name Rose or Simeon. Those transcript allegations were separate from the SAT invalidation on which the NCAA based its eligibility ruling.

Rose received a qualifying SAT score after taking the test in Detroit in May 2007. Allegations that someone else might have taken it prompted an Educational Testing Service investigation. Memphis learned of alleged score irregularities in October 2007; university officials said they could not substantiate them. Rose played the season, and Memphis later emphasized that the NCAA Eligibility Center had cleared him twice before he took the court.

ETS sent Rose requests for information dated March 17, 2008, while he was playing in the NCAA tournament, and April 10, after the championship game. In May, after Rose did not cooperate with the investigation, ETS invalidated his score. The NCAA treated that invalidation as making him retroactively ineligible. Its ruling did not require proof of an SAT stand-in: the loss of the qualifying score was enough.

Memphis disputed that logic. University president Shirley Raines said the school had performed its “due diligence” and followed the eligibility rules. Given the NCAA’s earlier clearances, she called the penalty unfair. The university’s internal investigation, released in June 2009, also concluded that there was insufficient evidence that the player knew or should have known he was ineligible while competing in the NCAA championship. The NCAA did not name the player in its findings, though contemporary reporting identified him as Rose.

A separate finding concerned free transportation on the team’s charter plane and lodging at its hotel for a player’s brother, identified in news reports as Reggie Rose. He was then a Memphis student, not a member of the basketball team. The NCAA report valued those improper benefits at more than $1,700. Memphis accepted the facts but disputed the punishment. “We made an honest mistake,” Raines said, adding that the university had changed its travel procedures.

In March 2010, the NCAA’s appeals committee upheld the penalties. Its stated basis included an ETS letter warning that the athlete’s eligibility was in serious jeopardy and that failure to respond would make him ineligible. Memphis said it strongly disagreed. The university had kept its commemorative banner hanging at FedExForum during the appeal; after losing its final appeal, it had to take down the banner and return approximately $615,000 in tournament revenue.