In your experience, is the dumb jock stereotype true? And is it true that teachers give players on the football/basketball team passing grades just so they can play?
I was a PolSci TA at UofI. Seemed like a good share of football and hoops players took a lot of PolSci classes. And yes, many of them were dumb as rocks. There were a couple of smart jocks - who really stood out in comparison. Only once was I told to give a passing grade to an athlete - future pro QB - who never attended my class. One other time a football player asked me to give him an F rather than an incomplete, which would render him eligible to play in a holiday bowl game.
Depends on the school, depends on the professor, depends on the jock. There have certainly been scandals at some universities (such as the “paper classes” at UNC) where elite athletes were given highly preferential treatment. For some schools, athletics is a massive part of their financial picture, and protecting those athletes is seen as a budgetary necessity.
The dumb ones show up on the evening news from time to time for their spectacular errors in judgment, but there are smart ones out there too.
In my undergrad days pursuing a mechanical engineering degree, I studied with a fellow ME major who was on the school’s championship-winning football team. He was a good study partner and did well in the classes; he was no “dumb jock,” and he didn’t need any quarter from the instructors to get by.
At my high school, the valedictorian of my year was the star of the (very good) football team, and the salutatorian was the best wrestler we’d had for a decade.
There are dumb jocks. There are smart jocks. There are smart non-jocks. If it looks like jocks are dumb, it’s just because you don’t see many dumb non-jocks in schools, because why would they be there?
Yeah, there are both dumb jocks and smart jocks. In my experience I’d say the dumb ones outnumbered the smart ones, but only marginally so.
If your high schools value athletes over academics that’s what happens. If your colleges value cash flow over academic honesty same thing. If you value money over integrity it absolutely creates dumb jocks.
You may be surprised to learn it’s not a world wide phenomena, it’s actually pretty American centric in my opinion.
And at it’s core it’s a failure of integrity. When you can sideline athletes for protesting, but then knocking your hundred pound wife out cold, on camera, garners a slap on the wrist and you’re back in the line up AND being celebrated, you’ve got issues that need serious attention, in my opinion. Talk won’t cut it. And those worshipping money are unlikely to come around on their own.
I don’t see this reserving itself anytime soon, it didn’t just happen overnight. It was a long time getting here.
Yeah and there are dumb people and smart people.
But dumb people don’t graduate from college. Dumb jocks do.
True story: One evening, I was sitting in the lounge of my university dorm at a big state University, reading the text book for tomorrow’s class.
At the table next to me was a football player on the official school team. He was meeting his private tutor, (a service offered to all school athletes* to help them with make it through their classes. )
I overheard the tutor say, "no, Tom,…that word is F-U-L-F-I-L-L, pronounced “fulfill”.
*and described well in fiction by Tom Wolf, in his novel about university life called Charlotte Simmons. He describes an athelete being told to write a paper on an certain historical event “as a catalyst” to World War II. The character in the book says, “wow, man, what’s a catalyst?..I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of those things, but I’ve never seen one”. 
This always bothers me. Sure, there might be a few football or basketball players that are marginal and don’t express themselves well, but there are also sons and daughters of wealthy donors who spend their days in frat and sorority houses never going to class. The fact is, college athletes graduate at a higher rate than regular students. and they have to spend several hours every day at practice and workouts.
I played a sport at a major state school and on our team were future scientists, lawyers, and doctors, as well as one or two pro athletes. There wasn’t a dumb guy on the team.
People see one dumb jock and extrapolate it to all jocks. Go look at your schools cross country team and see what their collective GPA is and what they are majoring in. Then imagine how you’d do in those majors if you had three hours of practice and workouts to do every day.
At my college, the athletics program was pretty low on the priority list. So, even the dumb jocks were pretty smart.
The sports editor of our newspaper was a jock, and he was both smart and studly. He got way more than his fair share of girls…
Are there “legacy” admissions at state schools?
When I was in school, admission was based SOLELY on GPA and test scores. Except for the jocks. That is why SOME of the jocks stood out - if they weren’t jocks, they would never have been admitted with the minimum NCAA required test score, or they would have dropped out along the way.
Re: GPAs/majors/graduation rates - do you think there is a difference between “revenue” and other sports?
Some of the guys on my teams did well in school.
There were a few that wouldn’t have gotten into college without athletics. The extra tutoring helped them a lot and their grades improved every year.
If your parent is a big donor, you get in. Maybe not a traditional “legacy” but the same thing more or less. I knew one. He did nothing but he graduated.
Yes, football and basketball are different than other sports. When I was being recruited in HS, the first question was always “What’s your GPA?”
Edit: I was not a football or basketball player. But a fairly major secondary sport.
Actually, they don’t. One of the many scandals in college athletics is how low the graduation rate it. It’s possible to fulfill the NCAA course requirements to keep eligible, but not get the credits in the proper courses for them to graduate. Football players are especially vulnerable to this, since the season ends before the final term.
I dont see how well an athlete could do in college if they are expected to practice 4 hours a day and have several games a week (like the basketball team does).
At the college level, it’s probably important to draw the distinction between student-athletes in “revenue sports” (i.e., football and men’s basketball, and possibly a few other sports at select schools), and between colleges that are traditionally competitive in those sports, and count on those sports to help drive alumni involvement and donations (particularly in NCAA Division 1), and those that aren’t.
You don’t need to dig hard to find many stories of student-athletes in those revenue sports whose collegiate credentials were questionable, and who would not have been able to get into a big school on their academics alone. Similarly, it’s not hard to find stories about such athletes who were allowed to skate through college, because the athletic program wanted to make sure that they stayed eligible to play.
Are those kids “dumb jocks,” or are they coming from disadvantaged backgrounds and bad high schools? Or, alternately, are they smart (or, at least, not dumb), but have never had to apply themselves to schoolwork, because they’ve been given a free pass for years? That’s hard to tease out, but it’s clear to me that that, for some schools, in some sports, the pressure to put skilled athletes on the field is very high, and the culture there encourages cutting corners for those athletes.
That said…by no means does that mean that every player on a revenue sport is getting coddled academically, and certainly there are going to be many smart (even brilliant) kids playing those sports. And, also, there are schools which manage to field competitive teams, even while being known for high academic standards (e.g., Notre Dame, Stanford, etc.) – though fans of those teams have been known to bemoan the impression that their schools would be able to compete better on the field if they had lower academic standards.
Outside of “revenue sports,” and outside of the major schools, I think I generally agree with you, Lamar Mundane. The student-athletes on the cross-country team that you mention (or the gymnastics team, or the women’s hockey team, or any of the other “non-revenue” intercollegiate sports teams) are unlikely to be getting any sort of preferential treatment at most schools, and while some may be getting athletic scholarships, the ones who aren’t cut out for college very likely don’t last.
You find a way. You take a diminished course load during the peak semester for your sport, make arrangements with professors to take tests and quizzes at times that don’t conflict with your practices or games, you study in the bus on the way to/from games, reduce your social life, and buckle down. There are thousands of NCAA Div 1 student-athletes in non-scholarship sports that do this every year. It’s no walk in the park, but if there’s a will there’s a way.
One time I was having a drink at a bar in the afternoon, joking around with the bartender and some of the patrons. I asked if anyone wanted to hear a dumb-jock joke. The bartender informed me that before I continue I should know he used to play college football, the guy right next to me had recently retired as a minor league ball player, the guy at the end of the bar listening in was a high school football coach, and that most of the other people there were at one time or still participating in amateur and professional sports. So I told him never mind, I didn’t have time to explain the joke to all of them.
“That’s OK, I’ll tell it with smaller words.”
I think the dumb jock thing is more prevalent at the high school level. I knew more than a few guys in HS who were either tall or big early, so got a pass so they could play basketball or football (one guy was pretty much illiterate - and almost seven feet tall). Even then, what some people see as dumb jocks are just people that focused on different areas. Talk about the LOTR and you get blank looks - talk about creatine supplements and you’re talking to an encyclopedia.