Pitt missed out on landing a prep center project Hamady N’Diaye this year. Instead he chose to go to Rutgers. Turns out that may have worked out for Pitt in a way. N’Diaye plays at Stoneridge Prep and, as Shirts and Skins sadly notes, is one of the prep schools that has been exposed as at the very least having the appearance of a diploma mill. The school claims it’s just that they missed a deadline.

Stoneridge Preparatory School in Simi Valley, Calif., which was the subject of another report by The Post, also was listed as “inactivated” by the Clearinghouse. Lennon refused to comment on Stoneridge’s status.

The Post reported that Stoneridge players attended classes for a few hours each day and were so loosely associated with the school that most students had never seen the team play.

Jeannette Noble, an administrator at Stoneridge, said two NCAA officials visited Stoneridge last week and asked questions about the school’s classes, graduation rates and whether many of the school’s students attended college. Noble said the NCAA contacted the school after she failed to submit a questionnaire by the deadline.

“They just wanted to make sure it was a real school,” Noble said. “They took a tour of the school, and we showed them our textbooks, which are college prep. I’d hate to be lumped into that category of schools that need to be audited because I was late turning in the questionnaire.”

Under the plan from the NCAA, that means N’Diaye will not be eligible this fall.

As an amusing sidenote, since both the Washington Post and the New York Times have run stories this year on diploma mill prep schools, both are not shy of basically implying in the story that their sole coverage has been the reason the NCAA is cracking down.

A series of stories in The Washington Post has raised questions about the academic integrity of some prep schools with successful basketball programs and the NCAA Clearinghouse’s certification of transcripts from those schools.

and

The N.C.A.A.’s actions come in the wake of a series of articles in The New York Times illustrating how high schools and prep schools gave students fast and easy grades so they could qualify for athletic scholarships.

Let’s be fair and suggest that two national newspapers covering the same issue definitely pushed the issue, but suggesting exclusivity is more than a little deceptive. Someone alert the ombudsmen.