In college news, TMQ contends that football-factory coaches emphasize winning above all else because there is no reward for academic outcomes. Cory Scott of Ambler, Pa., notes this column by Jay Paterno, the quarterbacks coach at Penn State and Joe’s son, proposing that academic success be added as a factor in the BCS formula. If it were a factor, Jay Paterno finds, Alabama would still be in the title game next month — but facing TCU rather than Texas. Here, Lindsey Luebchow of Yale Law School takes a similar approach with her third annual Academic BCS rankings. Luebchow analyzes the top 25 football schools at season’s end and factors in both graduation numbers and the NCAA’s “academic progress rate.” Looked at this way, with more classroom emphasis than Paterno’s ranking, the BCS Championship Game would pit Penn State against Stanford — while Texas, with horrible academic stats for football, plummets all the way down from No. 2 to No. 25 and an appearance in TMQ’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback Bowl Presented by TMQ.
Paterno and Luebchow are on to something big. The BCS is all about elaborate computer formulas. Football-factory coaches and boosters often claim for the sake of show they care about academics. Make it official — add academic measures to the BCS computer formula! Do this, and within a single year there would be intense focus on classroom performance at every BCS-hopeful school. This isn’t a whimsical idea, it is a perfectly serious and practical idea — if the NCAA and the BCS want to prove they’re not just moving their mouths when they say they care about GPAs and graduation.
Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ’s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas'”, ESPN Page Two, 2009-12-22
December 23, 2009
QotD: College football and graduation rates
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