Academics & Athletic Success
The Chron ran an interesting article today about Stanford’s recent athletic woes.
This article brings to mind some comments that I’ve read over on Stanford chat boards. Often these comments are something along the lines of "Stanford [Football] wants to achieve athletic success without compromising academics unlike Cal [Football]".
Ah, yes. Our wonderful rivals across the bay are claiming that Cal Football has turned itself around by loosening its admission criteria.
True or not true? Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t have the average SAT scores and GPAs of our incoming freshman football class. Nor do I have the average SAT scores and GPAs of Stanford’s incoming freshman football class. Even if I did have those stats, it wouldn’t be a fair measuring stick if it’s true that Stanford allows their students to drop a class after the final.
In this article, even a Stanford alum concedes the not so pleasant truth that it’s almost impossible to flunk out of Stanford:
"the knowledge of us graduates that the hardest part of Stanford is getting in, and the second hardest is flunking out"
So how has Cal turned around its football program? If you read the Chron article that I linked above, you certainly might make the inference that Cal Football has enjoyed the success it has seen in the past five years because of looser admission criteria. This inference might be true, and might not be true.
But what that inference and the Stanford explanation for Cal’s success is missing, are other determining factors such as coaching. Yes, it’s possible that Cal might have slightly looser academic criteria but sheer talent can’t alone can’t get you Ws for all the games on your schedule. Cal has Jeff Tedford, a great football head coach (coaching is his part-time job, when he’s not coaching and recruiting he’s busy being God). If Stanford had Tedford since 2002, I’m sure he would have kept their program afloat and not pile-drived it into the ground like Walt Harris.
So the point I’m trying to prove is that there is no all-encompassing answer. And even if it is true that Cal has looser academic criteria for its student athletes, does it really matter as long as the student-athletes stay in school, maintain good GPAs, and graduate?
Since Tedford’s arrival at Cal, Cal Football’s graduation rate has sky rocketed. If you only count the recruits that Tedford recruited and exclude the recruits from the Holmoe era, Cal Football’s graduation rate is spectacular. Even if Cal does have looser academic criteria for its athletes, Cal is doing a great job at giving them the support and assistance they need (if needed at all) to get through school. So what if our graduates scored lower on the SATs or had lower high school GPAs? That doesn’t matter any more. That was high school. Cal’s student athletes are graduating,with a degree in hand from the number one public university in America. A university where students do flunk out. And a university where students actually have to earn their grades.
So what should really matter is simply how well universities keep their student athletes enrolled. If you look at the 2005-2006 NCAA APR Report, you can see that Stanford Football and Cal Football are both doing extremely well within the sport (Stanford ranks in the 90th-100th percentile, while Cal ranks in the 80th-90th percentile of all Division I schools). Good job, Stanford. Good job, Cal.
Now, let’s get back to the Chron article. Stanford is hampering their athletic program’s success because they want student athletes that are nothing short of geniuses.
In my opinion, Stanford’s need for increasingly intelligent students is a reflection of their inferiority complex to the Ivy League schools. Why do they feel this way? I don’t know. In my opinion - and I’ll put away my bias for a second - I feel that Stanford’s academics are comparable to the likes of Harvard and Yale. Some magazines might rank the Harvard or Yale a bit higher than Stanford (or not), but all those schools are in such an elite echelon that I don’t think it really matters where you go to school within that echelon.
The Chron article reports that some of Stanford’s recruits were accepted to Harvard but rejected admission to Stanford! Now if you want to assume that Harvard is a better school than Stanford, for Stanford to reject a Harvard admit is baffling if not a mistake. If you want to assume that Stanford is better than Harvard, then for Stanford to make their own academic standards too extraordinarily high at the expense of their athletics is their own mistake.
If Stanford really want to brag and claim that their athletic teams are maintaining a 50% win percentage with genius student-athletes, then let them. I’m perfectly fine with winning the Pac-10 Championship or securing a Rose Bowl bid with student-athletes who have lower SAT scores as long as they learn, mature, and graduate from the number one public university in America - that is Cal.
