I think Brian is broken. Normally he makes some effort. Sure, it’s the sort of effort you see from a three-legged horse trying to pull a sleigh over ice or a Michigan (sucks!) football player taking an English Lit course, but it’s still effort. This time, there was no effort. And it’s sort of ruined our afternoon plans.
I failed to notice that, before his reposting of his “Destroy Harbaugh” post on mgoblog, Brian posted this. I link because I don’t care if he gets some traffic from HLS. There are lots of people already reading mgoblog because, well, there are a lot of stupid people in the world.
This is the equation we’ve set up in all varsity sports to some degree or another:
Large Group of Academically Underqualified Persons +
40-hour-per-week year-round commitment +
Grad rates at or above the University average =
X
Solve for X, and you get the kind of stuff detailed recently by the Ann Arbor News.
I mean, duh. The only group of people dumb enough to believe you can take star athletes whose uninspiring high school GPAs are almost entirely fraudulent already, give them a full time job, and then get those star athletes to graduate without hijinks are dickwad Notre Dame fans driven mad by their program’s 15 years of total irrelevancy. And, apparently, some but not all Penn State fans.
The Ann Arbor News knows this, of course, and knows that a similar examination of any program in the country would turn an equal or greater level of academic offense. So the editor puts on his I Are Serious Cat face and rumbles about “perception” and “reality” and how Michigan believes that it is better than everyone and isn’t this troubling, isn’t it? And we get sidebars about how poor Brent Petway couldn’t get into the music school when he discovered its existence… two years into his time on campus. Thanks a million, AANews.
This was going to be a big long article about the place of the athlete in the modern university; in it I would link the piece I wrote last summer when Jim Harbaugh was shooting his mouth off about the general studies program and the like, but when I re-read it I realized I didn’t have to or want to change it, so I’m going to bump it to the front page here in a few minutes.
Try and guess with which part I’ve taken issue.
But wait, maybe there’s a reason ND fans know that ND athletes can, in fact, be viable, nay flourishing STUDENT-athletes.
Here’s what the members of our 1987 STARTING LINEUP are doing today.
Chief of Staff to CEO of multi-national corporation
Senior Vice President – Investments, at major international bank
Senior Vice President - Sales, at international biotech corp.
Real estate developer
Offensive Line Coach - Jacksonville Jaguars
Senior Vice President – Brokerage Services, at major U.S. Bank
Director of Diversity, major U.S. corporation
Chaplain, Jacksonville Jaguars
Heisman Trophy Winner/Analyst/Entrepreneur
Commercial Airline Pilot
Attorney/Partner
Special Agent, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms
Vice President, major U.S. mortgage broker
Senior Vice President, Equities Sales at Wall Street firm
Executive Officer of (non-profit)/Adjunct Professor of Law
NFL retiree
CEO of capital acquisition firm
CEO of major food chain supplier
Special Agent, United States Secret Service-Presidential Protection Unit/currently Investigator for Congressional committees
Financial consultant
Director, Product Management and Marketing Communications at major U.S. corporation
Commodity trader
Places like Auburn, Alabama, Miami, and Michigan (sucks!) have given up on the student athlete. But they don’t want to give up on the big-money that comes with big-sports success. So they create kinesiology majors, give these kids an “A” for “trying,” and then dump them back into the real world as soon as they are no longer able to help develop revenue without any actual preparation for success beyond football/whatever-other-sport-they-played. It would be pretty funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
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