Their ideologies are fundamentally different. On one side, you have many college coaches and most fans of the Big Two (football and men’s basketball). This group is all about winning and not at all about classwork — remarks about “reprehensible” graduation rates don’t faze this group.

On the other side, you have NCAA President Myles Brand, who has spent the better part of his 15 months in the office singing the sorrows of a collegiate athletics system that allows 16 of the teams in this year’s NCAA tournament field to have graduated 25 percent or less of their student-athletes for the latest reporting period, a statistic bemoaned by Brand and pundits throughout the nation last week.

Brand militantly opposes the current permissive system and has a scary-sounding “incentive/disincentive” plan he is trying to get the association to adopt. And Brand is credible in challenging a behemoth, money-making system — he was the only person ever to successfully stand up to Bob Knight’s antics at Indiana.

On a third side (we’re not exactly sure how many there are) is the Department of Education, which has inadvertently become a villain in this year’s NCAA graduation rate report by suppressing any figures for which the numerator or denominator is two or less.

The move’s rationale makes sense — student academic records are presumed to be private, and it wasn’t hard to figure out in the past if individuals had graduated. Last year’s figures, for example, tell us that of the two true freshmen on Iowa State’s 1995-96 men’s basketball team, Tyler Peterson didn’t graduate (he transferred to Northern Iowa, which counts against Iowa State) and Tony Rampton did graduate within six years. The one-year graduation rate: 50 percent.

But why is that identification inherently bad?

The unfortunate consequence of the new suppression is that it muddies the figures even more. Transfers and early exits to the pros both badly skew the numbers away from relevance toward inscrutability.

Low graduation rates, particularly when they correlate to success, are a problem. Arguing that players are “professional sports” majors is bogus — nobody said universities have to bow to professional interests or serve the miniscule ratio of athletes who actually do advance to the pros.

What’s the answer to making more people care about getting athletes degrees? Materially punishing the teams that don’t cut it academically — and publicizing. Iowa State’s graduation rates, on the balance, are acceptable if not great. The NCAA needs to decide which is more important: A semblance of academic responsibility in sports, or the status quo — a lot of programs indifferent toward graduating.