Last week a federal judge gave new meaning to "March Madness" when he overturned the National Collegiate Athletic Association's minimum testscore requirements for athletes. According to Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter, these rules violate the civil rights of African-Americans, who fare worse on these tests than white students do. Some college coaches welcomed the judge's decision, but I'm very concerned about what will happen if we eliminate basic academic standards for athletes.

The NCAA standard -- known as Proposition 16 -- was hardly onerous. To be eligible to play in his freshman year, an athlete had to have a 2.0 high school grade point average and a score of 820 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Assessment Test (the average score is 1017). Keep in mind that SAT scoring was changed a few years ago in response to complaints that it was socially biased; it's easier to get 820 today than in years past.

Even if a student doesn't meet that low threshold, he can still enroll in college but can't play until he takes some remedial courses and proves that he belongs in a university. The success rate is higher with this approach than if you allow an athlete to play at once; you can't do remedial studying if you're practicing every day in a highpressure Division I basketball or football program.

No matter how low the current standards, the NCAA can't eliminate them all together because of the possibility that high school grades might be bogus. We instituted these standards because a lot of kids were getting admitted to universities when they weren't prepared. Universities were really exploiting these athletes.

Since we instituted minimum test score requirements, we've made noticeable progress. Graduation rates have improved, especially among black student athletes, and kids are coming in better prepared. The NCAA standards have been particularly helpful to high school counselors and coaches, who now have a stick they can wave at athletes. They can tell these students, "If you want to go to a big school and be a great athlete, you've got to do more reading, more preparing; more studying."

Some people say we're depriving inner-city kids of an opportunity to go to college, that we should "take a chance" on some kid who doesn't do well on academic tests. I have no problem with giving a kid a chance if that's really why the coach is recruiting him, not because he needs a pivotal player for his team. But remember that when you admit one student you keep out another.

We don't have an unlimited number of scholarships to hand out. In football each university is allowed no more than 85 athletes on scholarship at one time. In basketball, Division I schools are allowed 13. If you admit a poor student who's a great athlete, are you keeping out a better student who's a slightly poorer athlete? Can we justify forcing that better student to find loans and a job to go to college because he can't get the grant that went to someone else? Is dropping academic standards fair to him?

Those who argue that the NCAA policy is racist have to show that it has led to a significantly diminished number of African-American students in Division I basketball and football programs. I don't see it.

In fact at Penn State we have more blacks on our teams than ever before, and more of them are graduating. Penn State's football program has a graduation rate of about 80 percent in recent years -- and keep in mind that transfers to other schools count against you in the numbers. We've been very selective academically in recent years, and we've had more, not fewer, African-Americans.

We don't know what will happen now. It depends on whether the courts will grant a stay of the judge's ruling, and how the NCAA will react to whatever happens. We at Penn State are not going to lower our standards no matter what the NCAA policy is.

The real danger is that college sports in general could revert to the pre-Proposition 16, win-at-all-costs atmosphere. Winning football or basketball games means an awful lot to big universities, and human nature being what it is, some schools will bring in athletes just to have a good team, and if they don't graduate, so what?

Instituting standards doesn't mean we ignore the problems of the underclass -- quite the contrary. You have to address the problem of kids being raised by single parents or no parents. But you don't help them by lowering standards.

That problem has to be addressed in elementary schools and high schools. We at universities have to attack the problem from our end by demanding certain standards for kids to be eligible to play. That's the only way we'll keep the pressure on athletically talented youngsters to realize that their education comes first.

Mr. Paterno is the football coach at Penn State University.