There’s a reason I didn’t major in statistics in college. They give me a headache, no matter how hard I try to digest them.

But I do have an appreciation for what they can do. Baseball would cease to make sense without them, and they’re always useful whenever there’s a point to be made.

So when the NCAA trotted out its latest graduation rate figures for athletes the other day, I did my best to take a close look at them and figure out what they really meant. Immersed in GSRs and APRs, federal rates and things that happened seven years ago, I thought I was making some real progress.

Then my head started to hurt and I gave up on the whole thing.

Folks at the NCAA say more student-athletes are graduating than ever before. Fine, I guess we’ll have to take their word for it.

They’re the ones, after all, who invested a lot of time and effort in compiling the latest statistics that show 79 percent of all student-athletes who entered college in 2001 have gotten their degrees. That was up 1 percentage point over last year’s figures, and an all-time high since they began keeping tabs on such things.

NCAA president Myles Brand trumpeted the results as proof that his push for academic reform in college athletics is working and that the perception that jocks are dumb is just that – a perception. Athletes actually graduate at a far higher percentage than other students. And that’s not all that surprising because they get the kind of academic and financial help that the average student can only dream about.

Give Brand credit for pushing the issue. Since taking over at the NCAA he’s helped increase admission requirements to keep out the truly dumb jocks, instituted penalties for programs that don’t graduate a certain number of athletes, and forced coaches for the first time to think twice about recruiting athletes who can’t make decent grades.

But while his latest statistics don’t lie, they don’t tell the whole truth about college athletics, either.

Or, as an economics professor once said, “Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”

The new numbers are nice, but look closer and you see that the big-money sports that act as institutional minor leagues for the NBA and NFL continue to lag far behind other sports when it comes to graduating athletes. Football and basketball players who bring in the millions of dollars that fund other sports are far less likely to earn their sheepskins than someone on the gymnastics team.

Football still graduates only 63.6 percent of players compared to 62 percent seven years ago, and the hefty overall graduation numbers can be linked to the fact that men and women in minor sports enter college highly motivated to succeed in the classroom as well as on the playing field.

And then there are the degrees themselves. Does a football player’s degree in general studies really mean as much as, say, a lacrosse player’s degree in statistics?

Will it help him get a well-paying job if the NFL doesn’t pan out?

I guess if we crunched a lot more numbers we could get an answer.

Right now, though, I’m just looking to get an aspirin.