Meh. I know about a dozen guys that I was somewhere between best friends and decent acquaintances with that played in the NFL or played pro basketball (1 NBA but others overseas) and all of them did more work and went to more class in college than I did.

It's pretty tough to have a legit engineering/science major (one of my best friends was biochem and had to quit basketball his soph year b/c he couldn't make it work with practice and his lab sched) but even a kid of average intelligence who went to a bad high school can get a reasonable liberal arts education and be a D-1 stud at the same time.

It just takes a ton of work and focus and discipline.

College sports is a brutal lifestyle for those who do both school + play d1 sports. It's basically 2 full time jobs at once especially if you want to do well at both then it's even more especially during the season. Even in the offseason, you are working hard.

not a big ncaa fan but would def call Stanford a good program. is that wrong?

cal/stanford are similar to the vast majority of schools in that there are simply easier majors like communication or management or whatever, richard sherman isnt getting a computer science degree. if "this happens everywhere" people are referring to that then fine, if they think that administrations are intentionally setting up and funnelling ballers thru sham classes while telling the "professor" just to give them an A then I highly doubt that even in the sec

That movie has always bugged the hell out of me.

179 on LSAT ain't no small thing, nor is running a sorority.

Yea it's so brutal their entire experience is payed for, wah wah

Obviously it comes with its advantages or no one in their right mind would do it. The point is most college students even in the toughest majors typically have a ton of free time, between practice, class, study hall, coaching sessions, etc. your free time is very limited especially as a top flight athlete. Yes it comes with a huge advantage that everything is paid for (big man on campus, etc.), but college is supposed to be a blast for most people and it typically isn't for the full time athlete who wants to at least do decently well in class.

For instance my major would be virtually impossible with sports due to all the group projects, etc. that had to be done unless the person never wanted to participate in any of those. I knew the backup QB on our team was an engineer, but I'm not sure how well he did.

You can legitimately take and pass every class required to get a degree in a soft major with 15 hours of work a week or less. Undergrad is not anywhere near a full time job. I acknowledge that football is, but these same kids managed to sit through ~35 hours of high school a week and become great athletes so taking 20 hours out of the school week and adding 30 to practice each week isn't ridiculous by any means. It really is not that hard to fit in 10 hours a week to go to classes that require attendance and do the work for them.

Agree with this. I think a lot of the reasons that many good schools (Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, Northwestern, Vandy, Rice and even larger, but good state schools like UVA, UNC, Wake, and GA Tech) are not traditionally good at football is that the pool of players who meet their academic requirements is fairly small and they have traditionally chosen to go to places like Notre Dame, USC, and Michigan which offer similarly respected degrees. There just aren't enough smart, but elite players for 15 schools to have 75 great athletes and students so they end up congregating at a few schools. Recently, Stanford has taken a lot of that share with Duke and NW taking very very small slices out of the ND, USC, Michigan pie.

I have no idea if there are academic reasons (more lax class requirements, easier hurdles to clear for acceptance, a better reputation for helping you through the academics whether legally or illegally, etc.) for why programs like Stanford are up and ones like Michigan are down, but I suspect it has much more to do with the coaching staff and recruiting tactics and a success breeds success environment than any changes in the academic integrity.

Basketball is different imo. You only need 1 elite recruit and 2-3 contributors a year to be a consistently high to mid level NCAA seed with a chance to make the Final 4. The sheer number of athletes required to build a competitive program just isn't large.

WTF majors have less than 15 hours of work including class? I normally was in class for at least that amount of time if not more each week.

stanford seemed to get a kick start by having the best quarterback in like 15 years play for them along with an elite coach

If you include class, absolutely none.

The majors most football players gravitate towards? Think Housing or Parks and Recreation Management or Kinesiology or General Studies or Sport and Leisure Studies. These guys aren't taking Chem E! Tons of soft majors our there, particularly at huge public schools.

Keep in mind that they are also in school during summer sessions and some even enroll early and are in school in the spring before their "freshman" year. SO the course load can be really spread out. Any college player with half a brain graduates with a masters these days.

pretty much everything without labs or programming requirements (ie. engineering, hard sciences, and compsci) aside from math and maybe 1-2 other majors. I guess if you took lit classes or something the time spent reading would be more than that, but that's about it. All social sciences, business, or other soft majors should easily fall under this umbrella. My avg econ class had a problem set a week that took 1-3 hrs and then 1-2 tests plus a final. That is just not much work at all.

You werent taking multiple classes toward a major each semester? Obviously there are tons of classes that dont require anywhere near 15 hours/week

On top of that don't athletes always get first pick of the classes they want to take before anyone else?

Another factor is a lot of these guys are not as smart/focused as many of the people posting in this thread, so tutoring, etc. and takes more time on top of it takes more time to actually do the assignment if they actually have to do it.

Let's say these guys take 12 credit hours a semester. So in theory, in class around 12 hours a week, in theory for each our of class you are in, you are supposed to take 2 outside class, but who the hell does that. So let's say 1 or even .5 hours/hour class. You are left with 18 hours a week. I know for a fact athletes at most schools are required to take study hall and most get extra tutoring. So yes, you could skate by on 15 hours a week of class + school work but that would be pretty impressive for many of these athletes especially if they are taking "legit" non UNC African american studies classes.

most semesters I took 2 major classes, 1 non-major class specifically to fill a requirement, and 1 non-major class that I wanted to take that would help fill a requirement, but where that wasn't the main goal of taking it. Each class typically required 2-5 hrs of class and work in a week with a little more around a midterm/paper due date and obviously a busy week during finals regardless of schedule.

I think people are underestimating the role coaches and their staffs play in all this compared to the institutions. I imagine when an elite recruiter like Calipari comes to campus, he pushes for a ton of changes that help him recruit, whereas some random small time coach maybe doesn't have the desire or wherewithal to push for institutionalized cheating. I think programs like Michigan or Cal not being good is purely a function of the coaching staffs, and those institutions have the capacity to allow for cheating just as much as anyone else. I strongly doubt the good academic schools like the aforementioned are actually turning down elite recruits because of their grades, and if they are it's because the current coach doesn't have the stomach for it -- not that they, the institution, can't make it work.

Edit: and there are unlimited examples of illiterate morons playing for great academic institutions

Majors on UNC's 2005 title squad:

Jackie Manuel - AFAM
Sean May - AFAM
David Noel - AFAM
Melvin Scott - AFAM
Reyshawn Terry - AFAM
Quentin Thomas - AFAM
Jawad Williams - AFAM
Rashad McCants - AFAM
Marvin Williams - AFAM

Think Ray Felton and a bunch of walk-ons could have won the championship?

Schools with good academic reputations for undergrad fall into two categories:

1) Those that have higher than NCAA mandated requirements for athletes (Stanford, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, et al)

2) Those that don't (USC, Michigan, Cal, et al)


Those is category #2 shouldn't be considered "academic" schools when it comes to athletics. They typically have similar grad rates to non-academic schools and look at the same pool of recruits. The reason Michigan is bad is because the coaching staff is bad, not because of academic standards.

Those in category #1 won't even bother to recruit players who don't have decent grades/test scores. They don't hold the athletes to the same admission standards as the general student body, but they definitely look for players capable of doing the work and graduating.

Players rarely get "turned down" because they're not recruited in the first place if they're bad students. But it does happen (Ron Mercer, who played at Kentucky and later for the Celtics, was turned down by Vandy).

I'm not being hyperpbolic, but I don't think I was even close to 15 hours a week in college. Freshman year for sure, but I came in with a ton of credits and spent all 3 summers there.

I took practically minimum courseload every semester and went to maybe a third of my lectures.

I'm a math and science guy, but it turns out in college people were nearly as good at math, but I had a staggering advantage in writing papers. Term papers that my classmates were spending 100 hours on I could write in an evening and get an A no problem.

I mean, I also didn't really challenge myself academically, I took "rocks for jocks" and "stars for stoners" and "physics for future presidents" and all the chump classes like that.

I don't really regret it, I made pretty damn effective use of my time doing extracurricular, starting two of my own businesses, running a frat, learning data analytics, stuff like that but my academic experience in college was pretty nominal, and I certainly did't need to have academic advisors cheating to make it so.

Also, keep in mind lots of these athletes also arrive early, stay for 5-6 years and also spend summers there. So even if they're taking a real major, they might be doing it at 60% the speed of a regular student. That's certainly manageable.

I agree with GB. Outside of class time there zero chance I ever hit 15 hours of work a week in undergrad. And I was in a pretty reasonable major (econ with lots of math).

Grad school was a different story. Grad school brought the pain.

ok this is pretty funny

IIRC Michigan actually did have a recruit recently turned away for academic reasons.

I was an undergrad business major and easily had more than 15 hours of work per week counting classes. Fortunately, that also prepared me well for an MBA, as while the workload was probably greater, it wasn't anything I wasn't used to. Helped that I got my MBA in the same city in which I lived and didn't have kids yet, so I generally just went to class, met with some groups, and went home to do my work. No real distractions like in undergrad (well, except for my fiancee/wife - HEYOOO!).