Bcs Schools And The Academic Progress Rate

[Mean Green 93-98]

CBS Sportsline has an interesting story about the smokescreen the BCS schools put out to maintain their illusory image of academic superiority.

Link to story

Selected quotes:

Last week the NCAA asked you to suspend your beliefs.

It asked you to believe that Auburn football was one of the shining academic beacons less than a year after academic irregularities were uncovered by the New York Times.

It asked you to believe that lower Division I, Division II and Division III schools were the main academic offenders in its annual Academic Progress Rate report, but that only one football program among BCS schools is academically deficient.

The reality is that Ohio State (and its BCS brethren) can better afford to keep its athletes eligible than Idaho State.

There are academic support palaces built on major-college campuses that would make Frank Lloyd Wright jealous. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless those monuments are built so that athletes can be processed instead of educated. . . .

Conferences like the Sun Belt or SWAC can't afford to build such palaces, much less the staff to make them run smoothly.

"Randy (Moss) had no business being at Marshall," Ridpath said of the former receiver. "Randy is not a dumb guy. ... He wasn't a genius by any means but he clearly was there to play football. There was no interest given to Randy in his academic pursuits."

Instead, "we had to put together a huge mechanism that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep Randy and others like him eligible."