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But basketball is different; no sport's players have developed greater reliance on prep schools.
"No question," says Lennon. "This (regulation change) should have a much greater impact for basketball."
The 16-core hurdle isn't insurmountable. As American Christian (Pa.) prep school coach and former Wings Academy coach Tony Bergeron says, "If you can't get to 16 cores, there's a problem."
But in recent years, players from the Big Apple - including several who played for Bergeron - have relied heavily on prep schools to bail out ailing transcripts. Often, hyped high school ballers muddle through their freshman year, barely passing - even failing - classes.
As upperclassmen, they realize that their college hopes depend on grades. Like Nixon, they hit the books, passing as many NCAA-required classes as possible.
But if they didn't meet the NCAA's former requirement of 14 cores, no matter. They just headed to prep school to polish their grades for a year or two.
Time in prep school has become routine and widely accepted. Forward Justin Burrell spent a year at the Bridgeton Academy (Mass.) before enrolling at St. John's. And Seton Hall's Mike Glover is a 20-year-old freshman largely because the Bronx product attended two preps, American Christian and Boys to Men Academy (Chicago), while trying to improve his transcript.
The situation worsened last summer. The NCAA dubbed 15 prep schools "diploma mills," stating that transcripts from such preps would be scrutinized by the Clearinghouse.
After one year at a "diploma mill" a player with a history of classroom struggles would miraculously get his grades together, suddenly qualifying for college.
"Prep school," says Christ the King coach Bob Oliva, "was a band-aid."
The NCAA wants no more band-aids. The restrictions on prep schools erase the impact of diploma mills - and minimize the preps' influence.
Meanwhile, the increase in core requirements breeds a sense of urgency in athletes. Lennon says kids shouldn't wait for "the light bulb to go on" when they're juniors.
"They need to be taking academically rigorous courses from the moment they start high school," he says.
Basket-weaving doesn't count, either. Each NCAA-accredited high school has a Form 48H listing its qualifying classes, a collection of math, science, social science, English, foreign language and religion survey courses. The 16 cores must come from that list.
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