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 =
XSolve 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.
- HLS Tweets for the Week of 2009-11-15 - November 15, 2009
- HLS Tweets for the Week of 2009-11-08 - November 8, 2009
- HLS Tweets for the Week of 2009-11-01 - November 1, 2009
Don’t forget the crux of his argument: “data data data data”. He thinks that saying it creates it. Funny how all of his analysis boils down to “They said mean things about us but Notre dame sucks.”
I find the comment from ol’Brian’s article states it all about the attitude of his listeners. The comment ” it’s a good thing this came out during the NCAA’s and it is not a slow news cycle” paraphrased somewhat.
Has the last 15 years been less than stellar, you bet.
ND will be back for NC # 12 or 13 soon.
Oh yeah, with players who actullay graduate and become employed.
Examine your prejudices. After all of the trouble that Alabama has been in over the past two decades, one thing you will not find in any NCAA investigation is Academic Fraud of any sort. I can’t speak for Auburn or Miami, but at Alabama the student athletes don’t have “general studies” majors to fall back on. They take cake-walk majors like business and education just like the rest of the bottom half of the University’s student body.
Alabama is a public university in the south. It will likely never have a student body with the academic capacity and achievement that Notre Dame has, that doesn’t mean that the athletes are getting off with a free pass, though. It means that public education in the south is irreparably broken.
Cake walk majors?
Take a stats class, micro econ, accounting, finance or even marketing.
Its apparent that every major may have some get over courses, however business is not an insulated profession such as some of the ohters that are available.
Can I say as a Vice Principal of a school that I am surprised that someone could call learning how to teach 25 children in classroom a cake walk? Try subbing at your local elementary school sometime, or try teaching someone to read, spell and write coherently. Then tell me it is a cake walk.
I didn’t go to ND, but they don’t hand out Pez dispenser degrees. And Pete, the south isn’t what it used to be. Quite using “the South” as an excuse, and start raising the expectations for children/student athletes. Why is it we can expect excellence on the field of play but not in the classroom. Education on the college level is a choice, not a requirement.