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FIRST UNC, NOW Syracuse -- academic fraud is spreading through colleges like mono, and schools have no clue how to contain the outbreak. Administrators have already tried gambits ranging from taking away scholarships to hiring armies of advisers, but nothing has worked. Recently, the University of Maryland cooked up a novel approach: Coaches won't receive any bonuses unless their teams surpass a modest academic threshold. The University of California system is considering a similar policy. Tom McMillen, one of the Maryland regents who devised the rule, predicts a "trickle-down" effect: "If a coach cares and sets the right culture, you're going to have academic success."

It's a compelling, well-intentioned idea. But it won't fix the academic crisis in college sports because it relies on a flawed premise: that the solution lies with coaches. In fact, coaches might make the problem worse.

Because of the warped logic of the NCAA rulebook, college sports have long been governed by the transitive property: If you want your athletes to excel, you invest the only way you can -- by rewarding their bosses. But though it might seem like people become heat-seeking drones when they catch sight of a little extra cash, a large body of academic research shows that financial incentives for complex tasks (as opposed to, say, pushing a button over and over) don't actually work.

Several college coaches already receive academic bonuses, and there's little evidence of any effect. When Louisville hired Steve Kragthorpe as its football coach in 2007, it offered him up to $200,000 in incentives for academic achievement. Over the next three seasons, the team's academic progress rate plummeted. But when Kragthorpe was fired in 2009, it wasn't because of classroom struggles -- it was because the team went 15-21. Kragthorpe's replacement, Charlie Strong, received a contract with a lower academic bonus. During his tenure, the team's APR soared.

Maryland's policy, which prevents coaches from receiving any bonus unless their teams maintain about a 50 percent graduation rate, does raise the stakes. Going forward, all coaches' and athletic directors' contracts will contain this provision. But while their bonuses will be tied to APR, their salaries -- and job security -- will still depend on the same goal that motivates every coach: winning. "If I'm a football coach and I can win two more games or get my bonus, I'm gonna take the two wins," says Bob Malekoff, a former associate athletic director at Harvard and now a lecturer at UNC who studies the role of sports in universities.

But there's a bigger problem with academic bonuses: They reward results without any regard for how those results are achieved. And so coaches become like the Wall Street traders who were paid to earn massive profits without any incentive to avoid risk or shady behavior. UCLA's athletic director, Dan Guerrero, cautioned in January that aligning coaches' bonuses with academic metrics might drive students to pick easier majors to help secure their spots on the team. (The UC board recently tabled the policy for further study.) Others have warned of outright fraud.

Consider what happened at UNC. In 2005, one columnist praised the school for paying hoops coach Roy Williams an academic bonus as big as his postseason reward, ensuring "the right intentions." We know how that turned out. Mary Willingham, the former adviser who first went public about the school's system of sham classes for athletes and later settled a whistleblower suit against the university, says coaches do monitor grades -- but not out of concern for players' well-being. "It was more about keeping everybody eligible," she recalls. "A coach would come in and say, 'I gotta have this player.'" More effective solutions, she argues, focus on the students: developmental course work and practice limits, for example.

And while coaches themselves may not hatch illicit schemes, it's possible that they'll place more pressure on overworked, underpaid academic advisers. "The only thing [academic achievement bonuses] will do is encourage more shortcuts and more cheating," says Gerald Gurney, who heads the Drake Group, a college sports think tank. "And coaches will be laughing all the way to the bank."