Why student-athletes (and their parents) choose Notre Dame

[Legacy]

Part 2 - Football
Top Recruits also choose ND because:
- To optimize their football development and chances of getting drafted and drafted higher
- Notre Dame will soon be challenging for a National Championship every year and has played in BCS bowls 2 out of the 3 years Weis has been here
- Pro coaching and pro-style offenses and defenses
- To play with and against top competition and have the advantage of playing very visibly on TV weekly
- A pro coaching assessment of their skills and where they need to develop
- Terrific training facilities
- Coaching connections with the NFL and their confidence in Charlie for an objective evaluation


Notre Dame graduates and the draft:
- in 2008 all but two eligible players were drafted or signed free agent contracts
- From 2002-07, the NFL has drafted 29 ND players, and 21 are still playing in the NFL (Tuck, Mahan, Faine, Gandy, Jones, Quinn, Battle, Weaver, etc)
NFL Draft History: Full Draft - by School
- Charlie and Company's coaching has improved recent players' performance resulting in higher draft placement

[VictorsValiant]

I feel the need to respond to this because the Michigan fans are having a nice debate over academics and football after the Ann Arbor News "exposed" Michigan for steering athletes into the easy "General Studies" major.

These numbers only have value if the football players are at least marginally qualified academically. Why? Because good Universities attract top students. Their academics are suppose to be tough because top students are competing against each other in class. For athletes, such competition is even more difficult because they spend so much time on athletics. I find it extremely hard to believe that someone can excel in football and academics if they have a limited academic profile. It just doesn't make any sense. Something has to give.

So where's the data on the incoming SAT/GPA stats for athletes? If you have that data, we must compare that data with the changes in the SAT (which seems to have raised scores, so you can't compare the new SAT with the old SAT) and the median GPAs of students in each athlete's high school. We must then see how many Honors/AP classes each student took to gain more perspective on the GPA, especially in a school that does not weight GPA. Unless this analysis is done, Notre Dame cannot claim any more academic purity than other schools. I admit, when conducting this analysis, Michigan falls far short of meeting anything close to these standards.

I very much doubt Notre Dame meets these standards. Perhaps their scores are slightly higher than other schools, but even then the comparison is dubious. For example, if you count the academic credentials of walk-ons and players with little to no shot of playing on the field, my guess is that you'll find higher scores. This is a problem at Michigan because the players who actually make it to the field often have dreadful academic credentials (Manningham, for example). In other words, bench players were admitted with the rest of the academic pool, so their credentials are stronger than a similar pool at a lesser university. At the end of the day, there is a distinct possibility that the academic credentials of players who actually see the field are no different at Michigan than they are at a SEC school.

So the question becomes, why does Notre Dame (and BC) have such high graduation rates while seeing success on the field and on the recruiting front? Well, either Notre Dame and BC are schools where the academics are easy (only hard part is getting in), in which case these schools are exposed for poor academic training, or something else is going on. If ND and BC really do care about players and force them to spend all their free time on academics, the question becomes: What kind of grades are these athletes getting? Are they simply allowed to pass because ND and BC are afraid to give bad grades to all students, athletes or not? Is it simply that there's more grade inflation at these schools? Remember, employers are about how well you did. If you were a business major with a 2.2 GPA, you have just proven to your potential employers that you have ZERO marketable skills. You contrast that with someone who has developed a strong quantitative (math, science) or qualitative (writing, analytical ability) and the distinction is clear.

You have to ask these questions. These questions have led me to believe that for all practical purposes, Michigan football is no better than SEC-U when it comes to football players who actually make the field. What makes you think ND is any different?

[Sureal]

So you are saying ND is fudging grades or in so many words cheating to get better percentages? You took a lot of time getting that secret knowledge from something else besides factual evidence. Do you have anything backing up your claim? Or do you just know it to be true due to the fact that you have information that no one else has?

I'm not an ND grad but I'm sure one of them can answer your flame like questions if they so choose...

[daytonirish]

VV. The difference between ND,BC, and other schools with high graduation rates. Is that the school thinks of itself more as a place of higher learning than just a football school. The student athlete at ND,BC and other top academic schools are watched more closely or by better trained intelligent people. Who when they see a problem they confront it by sitting the player down from participation in order to get the grades to an acceptable level. If they don't they are suspended from the team long before they even get close to what the NCAA would call an academic problem. ND athletes are not given grades just to be able to play. If any player at ND at any time was being given this special treatment , it would be all over the newspapers, sports outlets and propably even the Evening news. The thing you have to understand is that ND ,BC and the other top academic schools let the incoming athletes know before hand that academics is priority #1 if they want to remain elegible. At scUM,tOSU and SEC, and USC, others football is first andf hey if you get an education WOO HOO.

[SoCalDomer]

Valiant, you're talking about SAT scores that really have nothing to do with the measure of academic success at ND or any college for that matter. Once the student is admitted, the SAT score is meaningless.

The scores that measure the academic sucess of student athletes at any school is the graduation rates, the number of academic all americans, and in a very small part the Wonderlic tests. (The wonderlic is a very small factor, but I think it reveals more than people really think; consider the fact that the lowest score of "6" was scored by a Michigan grad, while ND had two of the highest scores.)

Second, you seem to imply that somehow ND and BC student athletes aren't getting good grades, or the schools are giving them free passes. Well, if you're going to make those assertions, the burden is on you to support it with evidence.

You base that argument on the fact that there just isn't enough time to focus on academics and football. By that logic, the Naval Acadamy, Airforce and Army must have some of the stupidest athletes in Div-1. But that is not even close to being accurate. Our armed service acadamies obviously educate their student, athletes included. They likewise have some of the highest graduation rates.

It seems to me you know very little about ND or BC if you really believe they give lip service like that to academics.

Also, Michigan really isn't any different than the SEC schools who have terrible rates of graduation and like Michigan steer their athletes into simple majors. But Michigan is not alone; out of the roughly 120 schools in D-1, only about 30 of them graduate more than 70% of their football players.

[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...)

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.

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.

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.

[daytonirish]

If you really want to find out VV contact each school and ask them for the grades of the student athletes. I'm pretty sure by law they have to release them to you. You could also find out what kind of studies these athletes actually take. And as far as the Service acamedies not having good athletes. Dude not trying to be a smart ass. But what kind of drugs are you on. These MEN and WOMEN who attend the service acamedies are true athletes. They put there bodies through more physical stress then the any college football player does. Whether you believe it or not. Try fighting in the Iraqi desert or in Afghanistain carrying 100-125 pd ruck sacks in the mountains and heat for days on end. No time outs and no substitutions. Dude they are real athletes . Pat Tillman was an NFL player who left to join the military and gave his life for this country. Quite a few of these guys you see on the field for the academies actually end up in the top special op's units, or leading the Marine units into combat.