I've gone the other direction as of late. I know this might sound like I am looking at the worst, but I don't think parents of today's recruits really think this way. I mean, there are some diamond in the rough folks that put a premium on it, but generally speaking, most of them don't care. They'll let snake oil salesman sell them on "how they take care of players both while they are at [/insert school] and after". That is enough to get these parents to be okay with going to a lesser academic university for the sake of their real priority of getting their kid into the NFL, having them stay close to home, etc.
I think we give way too much credit to both the kids and their parents, assuming that they think like us. Most American (especially inner city) parents don't understand or deeply care about the difference in education between FSU and Notre Dame. Nor do 17 year old kids, whom have everyone giving them whatever they want, think the gravy train will ever stop. They are about immediate gratification, getting to the NFL and winning. Education has clearly taken a back seat. If it hasn't, then someone explain to me how the majority of the top ten recruiting classes are in the SEC over the last decade? Or how Alabama has had 5 straight #1 classes?
I'm not saying we can't compete with the negative recruiting, we have done a great job of doing just that over the last decade. But to say that this type of situation helps us is patently false. Parents today want their kids coddled, just like they do themselves. That is the profile of today's 5 star recruit family. That is far more common than the parent that would look at a situation where their kid got suspended for not snitching on a teammate, as positive reason to attend the school.
This is a very good post, and I agree with almost all of it, except the punchline.
I don't want to sound holier than anyone. I'm not. But we're talking an ideal here.
A society (or a university, in this case) should have certain standards that it believes are right. And even if enforcement of those standards is difficult, or has side effects that make it harder "to compete," it should stick with them because the society believes them right, right in principle.
Because of the practical difficulty of applying the principle (e.g., imperfect evidence and the nature of the offenses), or the understandable difficulty of living up to the principle (on the part of the "governed") (these are kids raised in a modern world that doesn't much honor commitment to anything), justice can be tempered on the penalty end (e.g., with penalties more lenient than expulsion). But you keep the standard because abiding the wrong behavior undermines an important, even critical, goal, here, the honesty and integrity of young people and the university. That is, you keep a rule you know may be hard to enforce and will be imperfectly enforced, because it protects an important virtue and not having the rule is terminal to your mission.
I don't know what to say about parents and kids who don't care about such rules. We can either explain why the rule matters, or we can go along with a society that, increasingly, pays only lip service to keeping your word and being honest. Or worse, we can keep the rule and not enforce it, compounding our timidity to face a messed up world, with hypocrisy.
