"Large Group of Academically Underqualified [sic] 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…"
I call bullshit. There are 168 hours in any given week. Let's say you really like your sleep and need 9 hours of sleep every single day. That leaves 105 waking hours. Subtract 40 for football and you've got 65. Say you’re also taking a ridiculous, totally unrealistic 20 credit course-load, which means you're spending roughly 20 hours in class each week. That leaves 45 hours. Spend 3 hours each day eating, napping, bumming around, etc, and you've still got 24 hours left to study. That's more than an hour of studying for every hour you spend in class. Need more study time because you're a dumb inner-city kid from Detroit? Sleep for 7 hours a night, take a normal 15 credit course-load, and only screw around for 2 hours every day. Now you've got 50 hours to study every week (over 7 hours every day). You can study for more than an hour per classroom hour AND spend more than an hour per classroom hour meeting with a tutor.
I'm not saying it's easy to be a student athlete. There are a lot of demands on your time and everyone wants to have a social life too. I'm just saying it's not "OMG-impossible-put-them-all-in-general-studies-give-them-A's-for-learning-how-to-use-day-planners-its-the-only-way." Sure, I would admit that the demands associated with being a football player actually do rule out the possibility of being a geothermal chemistry major with a minor in molecular robotics, but there's no way that you can't maintain a C average in pretty much any normal college major while also working for 40 hours a week, especially if the University bends over backwards to give you personal tutors, flexible scheduling, and any other academic resources you could possibly want. Honestly, how hard is it to get a degree in English? Anthropology? Marketing?
As frequent commenter Hoss so eloquently puts it, Brian has bought in to "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Just because most of these guys are black and from poor neighborhoods does not make them incapable of learning in the right environment. If you give them the support they need - by constantly monitoring their progress, providing them with personal academic counselors and tutors, and exhibiting genuine care for their intellectual well-being - instead of resorting to "hijinx" like relegating them all to a worthless major that basically acts as daycare for football players or throwing credits at them for tracing the outline of their hand with a crayon and then making the picture into a turkey, then they really can succeed in a college environment.
Schools like Michigan see football players as mercenaries who were hired to do a job and care about them only insofar as they are eligible under NCAA guidelines. Fans like Brian attempt to justify this attitude by positing that it's literally impossible to educate them properly… but how can they possibly say that it's impossible to do things the right way if they've never even tried? It would be one thing if they had attempted to legitimately educate athletes in the past and failed. At least then they would have some reason to believe it's impossible. But to just throw them all into the "General Studies School for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Want to Do Other Things Good Too" and just assume they're all too poor, black, and stupid to even attempt to educate is bigotry, plain and simple. It's also downright frustrating for them to assume that everyone else simply must be cutting corners like them. Notre Dame works too damn hard at cultivating these kids to be accused of academic "hijinx" by douche-pumps like Brian.
I've witnessed first hand just how hard Notre Dame works to provide our athletes with a quality education, and believe me when I tell you that the academic disparity between incoming Notre Dame and Michigan recruits is not nearly as large as many Notre Dame fans would like to believe. Sure, we require a few more high school credits, won't admit JUCO transfers, and avoid the obvious bad apples, but there might be ten players, tops, on Michigan's football team that wouldn't have been admitted to Notre Dame. We're taking the exact same type of person and achieving vastly different results, and it's not due to any hijinx, shenanigans, razzle dazzle, or any other form of tomfoolery.
Brian, it's really not that hard to believe that you can do things the right way if you don’t give up on these kids before they even start.
Labels: Asshat of the Year
