In another thread, I was criticized for my belief that academics should come before athletics.
I think we can all agree Notre Dame would’ve looked the other way if they were a NC contender. If you disagree with that, please explain the cognitive dissonance.
That’s not the way it works. No school is going to violate its policies about suspending players who get caught in academic misconduct, and every school is going to have such policies. In a school that puts an unethical emphasis on athletics (and I am not saying whether Notre Dame is such a school), they wouldn’t ignore the policy; they would ensure that the player never got caught.
Credit to you Chronos: you acknowledge they don’t truly care about academics.
Everett Golson took the Irish to the National Championship game in 2013, and was suspended the very next season for academic misconduct. Please explain your cognitive dissonance of completely ignoring that extremely relevant counter-example to your entire argument.
That’s news to me. I’m not a rabid college fan anymore. So it’s ignorance, not cognitive dissonance. I credit Notre Dame for caring about academics. But I ask, were they a NC contender last year? If not, my point stands.
They finished last season in the Top 15. This year, they’re #15 in one poll and #16 in the other to start the season.
Notre Dame is always a national title contender. Literally. They are in the running for the national title, at least until they lose a game, every single year. The combination of their prestige and their usually unimpeachably brutal schedule means they’re always in the conversation until they prove they shouldn’t be.
And they just suspended their best offensive player.
Seriously! Notre Dame is annually a NC contender? Did you watch college football during the 90s and 00s? Do the names Bob Davie and Ty Willingham ring a bell?
The fact remains that your argument with regards to Notre Dame has been totally debunked; they WERE a contender last year, were a contender the year before, are again this year, and suspended their best offensive player for academic misconduct. The hypothetical in your OP actually happened exactly the way you claimed it would not.
The Davie years were lean for Notre Dame, but Willingham’s tenure kind of makes my point. His first year, even coming off a 5-6 year under Davie, they were in the national title discussion until they lost to Boston College. No matter how bad they were last year, all Notre Dame has to do is win their first couple of games and the hype machine starts grinding.
So it’s a function of the name, and NOT the quality of the product on the field?
I don’t think it’s an either-or. It’s both. In a sport still largely governed by polls, the name is certainly a factor. Notre Dame’s name and history are such that a 5-0 start gets the national title talk started in a way that a similar start wouldn’t for most other schools.
Allow me to repeat myself:
I do not have sufficient information about Notre Dame to pass judgement, positive or negative, on them. I do not acknowledge anything.
ND has the second best graduation rate for football players (97%) in NCAA Div 1. They have traditionally had top or near top graduation numbers, so by that metric at least they have always valued the education along with the athletics.
You weren’t criticized for anything remotely like that. You were, however, soundly criticized for conflating payment for athletes with a lack of priority on academics. And you haven’t made any better arguments in this thread than you did in that one.
Isn’t paying for athletic performance pretty much denigrating academics? I give Notre Dame credit for their exemplary graduation rate. But that just makes them the exception that proves the rule.
While I was in college I had work study money as financial aid. As a biology major I had a job in the childcare center. My roommate had a job in the ice cream shop on campus. We were paid and expected to do our jobs in order to get funding for our tuition.
Does that mean my top tier academic University placed a higher priority on scut work than academics?
Some University’s do put too high a priority on athletics compared to academics for their student-athletes. However paying them to play sports is not evidence of that.
As a former ND tutor, I can attest that they do this by giving the athletes tutoring that is not available to other students, and that they have scheduling that pretty much guarantees the athletes will need the tutoring because they miss so many classes. (At least for football and basketball.)
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**Isn’t paying for athletic performance pretty much denigrating academics? **
No. Maybe. That’s part of the debate and opposing viewpoints were explained to you at length in the O’Bannon thread. You have yet to explain yours.
No, it’s not. There’s plenty of wiggle room between “exemplary academic standards for student-athletes” and “salaried football player”. We need only look to the one-and-done structure that the NBA has dictated for college basketball to see exactly how low standards can be set, and it becomes obviously clear that you have a very long row to hoe to convince anyone that your point has merit regarding football.