The battle is not yet over because the probable results are so grossly absurd and sickening that one has to plow on. The NCAA lost its first appeal of the decision by a Philadelphia Federal court that Proposition 48 and its 1992 successor, Proposition 1, are racially discriminatory.

Those propositions were passed by NCAA universities to get some minimum academic standards for freshman athletes in order to compete in their freshman year. The standards employed the national SAT and ACT tests and high school grade point averages. Let’s repeat that: The propositions did not prevent an academically ineligible athlete from entering the university, it just prevented him from playing his freshman year.

An athlete could enter the university, make the required minimum grades his freshman year, and then begin to play sports his sophomore year. The judge ruled the requirements had “an unjustified” impact on black applicants. In 1997, as an example, 21.4 percent of blacks who applied for Division I eligibility failed to meet the standards. For whites, it was 4.2 percent.

Where laws, standards, and in this case, NCAA propositions, have the effect of discriminating against a particular group, courts have adopted the standard that discrimination is thus proven, unless the side promoting those standards can show an overriding nondiscriminatory justification to continue them.

In this case, there is such a reason. Universities still exist for the purpose of education, despite what some coaches would like to think and despite how some university presidents and boards of trustees act. Students must apply and compete for positions in entering classes based on past academic work and test scores.

There is no reason that athletes should be treated differently, but of course they are, with or without the propositions. With the propositions, universities recruited ineligible players and sent them off to prep schools very friendly to the universities’ athletic programs. One year at such schools, then off to the big university in the athletic sky with just a fine prep school freshman academic record, thank you.

Without the propositions, all those ugly couldn’t-care-less-about-the-student coaches can have a field day. Now each university must decide what the requirements are for those who participate in sports for the institution. Those coaches who can or have brainwashed the university brass into believing wins really matter to the university’s reputation, and more importantly, fundraising, can go recruit the worst of the student-athletes.

Even with the propositions, we live with thugs, cheaters, rapists, and rap sheet athletes finding their way to supposedly reputable universities. Now what?

We are now going to find out what universities really mean it when they say “student athlete.” As always, the great exploitation will not be of the university or the coaches, but of the athletes.

Brought in to win games and get bigger contracts for highly overpaid coaches, athletes without college academic ability will be discarded from the universities after a year or two, just as they have been discarded everywhere else.

The answer is to eliminate freshman eligibility, eliminate the inane redshirt rules that keep 25- and 26-year-olds around universities to play one more year, and make the athletes abide by the same standards as every other student.

That, of course, would mean sports is simply a part of the university program, subordinate to academic interests. What a concept.

NEWS columnist Gary Thorne, an Old Town native, is an ESPN and CBS broadcaster.