[SoCalDomer]

Originally Posted by VictorsValiant

I'm not accusing ND of anything. I just think the same questions need to be asked of ND athletes as they were asked by the Ann Arbor News in their expose of Michigan football. Even though Michigan was rightfully exposed, I'm very curious about other football programs with good academics (like ND, BC, Stanford, Northwestern, UVA etc...)

why does the same question need to be raised? is there any evidence the schools that graduate 90% of their student athletes are cutting corners in order to arrive at those numbers? The answer is no. Be honest, the only reason you are saying these questions "need to be asked" is because you don't like that fact that Michigan has been shown to be a fraud. There is no other reason for it. Your logic is terribly flawed.

The bottom line is that I don't think you can base success solely on graduation rates because there are so many other factors. You need to look at graduating GPA, the median GPA of graduates from a certain major (grade inflation) and entering credentials. Those factors, so far as I can tell, have yet to be examined.

First, why can't you just look at graduation rates? You have no logical reason other than Michigan's sucks, and therefore you want to focus on other aspects that will help them look better.

Second, I never said the only thing to look at was graduation rates. I also said look at the number of academic all americans there are on a team. For football, also look at the wonderlic scores. You can also look at the types of majors the athletes majored in.

None of those things diminish ND's success. In fact, they only affirm the graduation rate.

With respect to entrance scores, I will be the first one to tell you they are given far too much weight by some admissions offices. Unfortunately, a lot of schools simply admit students with the highest scores irrespective of other aspects of their application in order to boost their U.S. News ranking. But let's be a little honest. The scores wouldn't be used at all if they didn't matter once you were admitted.

What I meant was, they don't matter in the sense that they measure what the school did to educate the student. The college had nothing to do with the student obtaining the score, so why should SAT scores reflect on the quality of education the college is providing.

The service academies are different because their focus is most obviously not on athletics. None of the service academies have good athletes, in contrast to teams like ND who recruit the best (???) athletes.

So what that their athletes are perhaps less athletic than top D-1 schools. The commitment to academics and athletics remains the same. In fact, it is more difficult for service academy athletes, since they must also participate in drills that other schools do not.