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BCS Criteria Mantra: More Than Just Academically Flawed


In this time of college football conference expansion talk, a foremost rationale for or against a school being accepted or rejected for entry into one of the Bowl Championship Series conferences is academics and/or the amount of research conducted at any prospective school.

I’ve tried to reason within myself how the amount of research could determine the credentials of schools for entry into a sports conference but continue to come up empty. For all appearances, the criteria of academics by BCS schools appear to be just a big red herring. If BCS schools were true to their implied puritan adherence to "academic criteria" for entry by others, wouldn’t they recruit student athletes that met their own "academic entry requirements" without exception and maintain a sports program that ensures they progress academically while playing?

By listening to President E. Gordon Gee's of the BCS the world who exclaimed "We (BCS teams of the Big-10 conference) don’t play the little sisters of the poor" or the BCS organization itself extolling the "elite" of their membership you surely would think so. With some exceptions, it’s becoming more and more clear academic standards are just another BCS talking point and not the reality for many BCS schools.

It appears that not much has changed since last year when an Associated Press article identified at least 27 BCS schools (10 schools did not respond to the AP's request and 18 other schools, including Notre Dame, Pittsburgh and Southern California, who declined to release their reports) where their student athletes were at a minimum ten- times more likely to benefit from a special admissions program than general population students. Ten-times more! That’s more than just rounding the numbers in the report—especially if you’re a really good tuba player with average grades and aspirations to "dot-the-i" in the Horseshoe or a C+ biology student with dreams of developing a new strain of "the hedges." The statistics would leave more egg on BCS faces if BCS Alabama hadn’t tightened up their standards for "special admits" in 2004-2006 when Crimson Tide athletes were more than forty-three-times more likely to benefit from such exceptions. Forty-three-times more sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Well, if you’re a tuba player I bet it does…

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