On March 14, the Wall Street Journal ran a 12-page special on the NCAA Basketball Tournament. The feature story by Stefan Fatsis, “Where Are They Now,” followed the post-tournament career of Mississippi State University’s 1996 Final Four team. (It ranged from prison to college administration.) Fatsis described tensions inherent to melding academic and athletic goals. It prompted me to consider Montana State University’s potential niche of excellence.

If a small university is to prosper and improve, it must identify, develop, and promote niches. It should identify fields that complement the school’s natural strengths. For Montana SU, accounting and architecture might be good candidates. Oncology and oceanography are not.

Athletics are analogous. While the school may consistently do well in women’s volleyball, MSU will never become a national powerhouse in men’s basketball and football. It’s costly to try.

Major schools with long histories of success have a huge recruiting advantage, e.g., those in the Big Ten and Pac Ten. Players with prospects of making the pros know they will have ample TV and magazine exposure if they excel there.

Consider a boy with career goals requiring a strong academic background, e.g., law, medicine, or the sciences. If he is really good and has high SATs and grades, and no criminal record (Oklahoma has just begun checking), he can play at Duke, Princeton, or Stanford.

This is the way the world works. What are the implications and how can MSU’s leaders constructively deal with them?

First, recognize that football and B-ball are important to many alumni. Administrators must maintain these sports.

Second, aside from Montana residents and the occasional student athlete with a strong interest in attending MSU, our recruiters have resorted to finding and attracting risky candidates. As the data make clear, sometimes dramatically, some of these kids do not adjust well to life in Montana. Many of these students come from rough circumstances. They desperately need good role models, discipline, and the imposition of high behavioral standards, as well as academic tutoring.

Given the above, here is a constructive niche for MSU athletic entrepreneurs to explore. Make the motto of MSU athletics “Character Is Destiny.”

Character development is (or should be) a central focus of intercollegiate athletics. Even the most devoted athlete recognizes the long odds of becoming the next Michael Jordon or John Elway. They should be strongly advised that after college, the skills fostering success lie off the field.

The understanding that character is destiny is not new. It moved to the fore of social policy debate as the failures of LBJ’s Great Society programs became obvious. Despite unprecedented federal funding, all the indicators of social breakdown rose: divorce, out-of-wedlock births, violence, crime, illegal drug use, and suicide all dramatically increased.

Innovative and courageous policy analysts such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and James Q. Wilson began documenting the keys to success: what matters most is the character of the individual and the character of the community in which they live. This could be MSU’s comparative advantage.

MSU can excel if it hires coaches by sorting on character and academic accomplishment. They should have good coaching records. But of far greater importance is finding those who will set high expectations and create a nurturing -- and disciplined -- culture. They must be committed to transform and build the human capital of at-risk students.

There are many assistant coaches who have a genuine academic background in a substantive field and who recognize they are most unlikely to ever receive a $600,000-plus contract to coach in the big time. The primary task for the MSU athletic director is to find and recruit them. Many, probably hundreds, would find Bozeman an attractive place to raise their families.

MSU is committed to its major sports programs. The realities dictate coaches must recruit some high-risk athletes. The most promising have better opportunities elsewhere. Where is our comparative advantage? Perhaps it’s in creating a sports program where coaches develop the character and human capital of their players.

As the reputation for doing so spreads, recruitment should become ever more promising. Winning has multiple dimensions. I suggest character be the one we emphasize.