Parlor Spider...Step In, Little Fly

Insightful thoughts and/or rants from atop the soapbox from one who wishes to share the "right" opinion with everyone.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

College Football Is About Graduation...Not






Clever Headline From The Oregonian

If reports can be accurate, given that they come from the national media, more people watched last night's national championship football game than any other program in the history of cable television. Seems unlikely to me even though I was watching it...as a graduate of the University of Oregon, I felt that it was my duty since I continually refuse to give into cajoling from student-athletes who call every year trying to get me to give money to the school. Today, I feel a bit bad about that, especially since the head coach Chip Kelly lost the opportunity not just for a national championship trophy with a soft drink logo on it but also the $750,000 bonus he would have received had the Ducks won the game. (Winning coach Gene Chizek got a paltry $600,000 bonus for his efforts)
While it is a no-brainer that schools that play in major bowls make ginormous amounts of money, such investments rarely lead to what many of the uninitiated might consider an important statistic: graduation rates among players. Take Auburn, for instance (please!). The school dropped from 4th place on the graduation success chart to 85th over the last couple of years when considering the graduation rate of its players. Although white football players graduated at a rate of 100%, only 49% of the black football players at Auburn walked out with a sheepskin. This marks the fourth largest drop among the 125 major college football teams in recorded history. It's certainly a good thing that ALL of those athletes will get huge pro contracts that will keep them solvent for, oh, five years or so.
Auburn's downfall was documented by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, located at the University of Central Florida. It seems the problems began when a sociology professor noted that a player described on television as a sociology major had never taken a sociology class...OOPS! He then discovered that there were 18 such graduates who had never even taken a sociology class...and things spiraled downward from there to the point where in the most recent collection of data, Auburn the nation's #1 college football team, graduated 63% of their football players.
However, lest you think this is a rant against the team that beat my Ducks, let's look at the graduation rates of the top seven schools in the polls vs graduation rates sweepstakes (statistics on polls prior to Bowls season, I suspect):
#1 Auburn--63%
#2 Oregon--54%
#3 Boise State--65%
#4 Texas Christian University--71%
#5 Michigan State--55%
#6 Missouri--71%
#7 Alabama--67%
In fairness, graduation rates for regular students are not exactly stellar, either, with the most recent showing a drop out rate of nearly 50%. From that angle, it would seem that these programs are doing great.
But regular students don't have million-dollar teachers or multi-million dollar facilities and budgets, either.
And the disparity between black and white graduation rates is troubling, to say the least.
Maybe I should be sending money to ordinary students.

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