Ok- I'm going to do this one more time. Urban Meyer is a fraud and a liar. The 80% number that he keeps using is the bogus GSR which I will explain again later. He also said in this article that the 80% GSR was #1 among bowl teams, which is an outright brutal lie, but he probably figured he was just talking to the same 17 year old kids that he lies to every day. For example ND's GSR is 95%, Boston College is 96%, and there were a few other bowl teams higher than 80%, so Meyer just simply lied, but that is not the real issue.
The real issue is that the 80% figure is the Graduation Success Rate (GSR), which is a bogus indicator that Meyer always tries to use to cite Florida's "academic excellence". It's all BS boys & girls, the actual graduation rate for the period in question for Florida football players is only 42%, for Notre Dame football players, it is 84%. Put another way, historically speaking 16 of the 18 ND recruits in the recruiting class of 2007 are likely to receive an undergraduate degree from ND, while only 11 of the corresponding 27 Gator recruits in the recruiting class of 2007 will accomplish the ultimate goal of a true student athlete. Not only was Meyer wrong in mistakenly excluding ND & BC and others , he is a total hypocrite for bringing the subject up at all, and he should be called out for it. Look the numbers up yourself at the NCAA website. See the link.
http://www2.ncaa.org/portal/academi.../grad_rate/2006/d1_school_grad_rate_data.html
More on the GSR:
The GSR applies to every player. What it basically means is that if a player leaves a program for any reason, and at the time he leaves the program he still has athletic eligibility, then he does not count against the GSR as long as he was still academically eligible to play football. In other words in the example above, for the purpose of the GSR, the NCAA considers this kid to have been a graduation success because they assume that he would have eventually graduated. That is why it is a bogus calculation because that assumption is bogus because it assumes that somebody who leaves early for the NFL would have actually graduated. As another example, if a player redshirts his freshman year, he is athletically eligible in his 5th year of attendance. If that player decides to leave school after his 4th year of attendance, and he is still academically eligible to play in that 5th year (which in this case means being within 30 credits of graduation and carrying a 2.0 GPA) then the NCAA does not count him against the GSR even though there is little chance that he would have graduated if he stayed for the fifth year.
Bottom line, the GSR is nothing more than an NCAA ploy in case at some point it is forced to use some academic success measurement to determine post-season eligibility, which will never happen anyway. The only true measurement of "academic excellence" for a real student-athlete is the actual graduation rate of the incoming freshman in each class. By that measurement Florida is not much better than the rest of the SEC, and not even comparable to the ND's, Duke's, and Stanford's. It is actually nauseous to continue to hear about the Florida football program's "academic success" because it is nothing more than an Urban Myth that he perpetuates on these 17 year old recruits.
Please Irish Envy members, on a personal note, I beg of you do not repeat Meyer's 80% graduation rate scam again because if I have to read it one more time, I swear I will be physically sick. Urban Meyer is a cockwad for sure, but he is also a fraud and a liar, and he could not care less whether any of his recruits receive a degree as long as they give him 2 or 3 good years. Every ND fan should be thankful that Urban Meyer did not get the job in South Bend because then every Irish fan would be a part of this guys rampant unethical behavior. I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't care how many NC's Urban Meyer wins, I would never want to be a part of it, even if it was at ND.
What price victory?
