<p>I'm interested in knowing how admission standards are matched with athleticism for football players interested in academically competitive Division I schools such as Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Wake, UNC..........</p>
<p>You get to add what you can benchpress to your SATs</p>
<p>Yep. That about sums it up.</p>
<p>Duke is one of the few ACC teams that still requires their athletes to be able to read and write. Ok, so I am overstating this a bit, but the fact remains that all of the ACC teams including Virginia admit football players who meet the minimum NCAA guidelines. For example, if you have a 2.0 in high school, you must have a 1020 SAT I. The higher your GPA, the lower the SAT you can have. GPA is calculated using certain core courses and not a lot of electives such as Shop and Band. I know of one exceptional football player with 1250 on the SAT I, and Duke was all over him. Duke put pressure on him to keep his grades at a certain level during the first part of his Senior years. All of the other schools interested in him, didn't talk much about his grades.</p>
<p>OK, here are some numbers for you from some various souces. The reported numbers are a little inconsistent, depending on the source. There may be difference in the average for the 80 man team (with "swimmies") and the average for the recruited freshmen (the real players). But, in any case, here's the best I can come up with and these are pretty solid ballpark numbers.</p>
<p>The ten highest average SATs for NCAA 1A football teams:</p>
<p>Stanford 1176
Northwestern 1101
Duke
Vandy
Rice 1080
UVa
SMU
Oregon State
Pacific
Wake Forest</p>
<p>Notre Dame (#12 on the list): 899 - 950
(I've seen two different numbers)</p>
<p>Ohio State (#69) 818
Miami (#80) 808</p>
<p>The minimum for NCAA eligibility is a combined 700 SAT. </p>
<p>Over half of the freshmen at Rice with SATs below 1000 are football recruits.</p>
<p>All of these teams listed above have what Tom Wolfe calls "swimmies". A reference to the flotation devices moms put on their little kids arms to keep them from sinking. In big time NCAA sports, swimmies are players with very high SATs or grades whose sole function on the team is to raise the average academic scores. Swimmies never see the field.</p>
<p>I guess my son will end up being a swimmie if he keeps playing football. Oh well.</p>
<p>Hmm, can you sign up to be a swimmie? Do they get athletic scholarships? Do they have to go to practice? Sounds like a good deal for someone.... ;)</p>
<p>Wow, Carolyn, was that really your 2,300th post???? Congratulations. That ought to get you at least an honorary acceptance at a top 20 school!</p>
<p>In hunting for the SAT data, I stumbled across a very interesting document:</p>
<p>It's an April 2004 Rice University Board of Trustees Subcommittee report, "Intercollegiate Athletics at Rice". </p>
<p>123 pages detailing the the negative impact of the lowered academic standards required to field a hopelessly uncompetitive football program. I just skimmed it, but it looks like fascinating data. It outlines several courses of action to consider, including dropping football entirely.</p>
<p>How 'bout this stat from the Rice report:</p>
<p>"...Rice athletes SAT scores fall more than 140 points below the average for Rice applicants who are denied admission."</p>
<p>The average non-athlete freshman at Rice in 2003 had a 1428 SAT. The average athlete freshman that year had an 1130 SAT.</p>
<p>What are the minimum scores for LACs and Ivys?</p>
<p>I wonder if there are any statistics on how these athletes do, both in school and after they graduate, in comparison with those who go on to state schools where the academics are less competitive.</p>
<p>I work with someone who was a full scholarship football athlete at Rice, recruited from the Watts area of Los Angeles. He is currently a V.P. at our company making well over seven figures. His perspective is that the experience of attending a school that was academically prestigious, even as an athlete who would not have qualified academically changed his life. The friends he made and the influence of the environment itself brought out his hidden potential.</p>
<p>"The average non-athlete freshman at Rice in 2003 had a 1428 SAT. The average athlete freshman that year had an 1130 SAT."</p>
<p>My guess is they can probably bench on average about 300 lbs as entering freshmen so my first post might not have been as fecetious as it appeared.</p>
<p>Seriously though to really assess the academic impact on the schools involved of these atheletic recruits the scores must be disaggregated. Are the SAT scores of recruited URM atheletes 140 points below the the average SAT score of rejected URM applicants at Rice? Probably not. What do the SAT scores of recruited football players look like when weighted by URM status versus the overall pool of Rice admits? If 30-40% of your recruited football players (or more) are URMs and the schools overall total is 10% (or less) you are comparing apples and oranges. Better yet lets weight for URM status and economic status and all of a sudden the football players won't look so bad at most schools.</p>
<p>Every friggin liberal in the country wants holistic admissions but then turns up their noses when that holism includes your 40 meter time or three point range. Sports and especially football and basketball have done more to help poor and working class kids of all races get a crack at the good life than all the Pell grants that have ever been given out. That is not to say there are not problems with big time college sports. It just to say that the Rices of the world shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.</p>
<p>I think, friggin liberal that I am, that graduation rates are more telling. After all, that <em>should</em> be the emphasis of any student, athlete or not. We know that people are admitted for various reasons with various scores and talents. Once admitted, the goal should be to have these students graduate. The athletic programs should have graduation rates similar to those of the student body as a whole IMO.</p>
<p>The racial issue is covered in the very comprehensive Rice report.</p>
<p>Over half of the black males enrolled at Rice are on an athletic scholarship. In 2003, blacks made up 3% of the non-athletes at Rice, 14% of the non-football athletes, and 38% of the football team. The report expresses concern that this may not be the more desireable mechanism for achieving diverisity:</p>
<p>"....a broader mechanism for meeting ethnic diversity goals is likely a more philosophically ideal path... Emphasis on sport as a means to balance the racial mix of incoming classes reinforces what is believed by many to be a dangerous message to minority youthsthat athletics is the only path to success and that they cannot compete academically."</p>
<p>Anyway, the Rice Report is fascinating reading. It is the most comprehensive set of statistics imaginable from a very elite university on everything from admissions data, to academic performance, to athletic spending to a detailed flow chart of the two admissions systems at Rice (standard versus athlete). Many of the stats given are compared to Rice's peer institutions.</p>
<p>Rice is in a precarious position because they have an undergrad population the size of the larger LACs, yet are attempting to play Div-1A sports. As the report puts it, they couldn't fill their football stadium even if every living Rice student and alum on the planet showed up for the same game. They find themselves spending proportionally huge amount of capital (both in dollars and admissions standards) to field an utterly miserable, uncompetitive football team.</p>
<p>texastaximom - I don't disagree with anything you say there BUT - when judging the graduation rates of recruited atheletes lets compare not to the student body as a whole but to a weighted student body that reflects the racial and economic backgrounds of the kids on the atheletic teams.</p>
<p>If I were to look at just the graduation rates of the poor and disadvantaged kids who are admitted to selective colleges under affirmative action I am pretty sure I would find lower graduation rates over longer periods of time and in less rigorous majors. Is that an arguement for not admitting them?</p>
<p>Like I said there is a lot wrong with big time college sports but the problem isn't that they admit kids less academically gifted than the average pre-med student. Heck the fine arts school and the music school and the performing arts schools do that too. Just take a look at Carnegie Mellon admits.</p>
<p>I-Dad:
1. Wow!!! I don't consider myself naive on this subject, but I had no idea the football SAT averages were that low! (So the 700 score you mention... was that verbal or math?.. whoops... "combined" !! :) ) </p>
<ol>
<li> You answered another one of my questions. I wasn't sure if team SAT was a stat that was actively tracked, and if the "swimmie" was just a concept or a reality, ie there is some value from the school's perspective to increase the average SAT score of their team.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>I went over the Duke b-ball roster a while back. They have all the players bios online. It is pretty easy to pick out the scholarship players (McDonalds all-Americas), several players were described as "walk-ons" and a couple did not even have distinguished high school careers! Clearly "swimmies". </p>
<p>Swimmies must practice! You need 10 players to have an intrasquad scrimmage. (in basketball)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Heck the fine arts school and the music school and the performing arts schools do that too.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The Rice report covers that too. The Music admits SATs averaged about 80 points below the Rice overall student average. The athletic admits averaged about 300 points below the overall average.</p>
<p>RE: "walk-ons"</p>
<p>In the Rice report, walk-on athletes were essentially indistinguishable from the student body as a whole: SATs, GPA, etc.</p>
<p>Additionally, the athletes is most sports were not terribly dissimilar from the overall student body in many measures. The stark differences show up in the "money" sports -- football, basketball, and (in Rice's case) baseball.</p>
<p>NJRes:</p>
<p>The problem isn't really that severe at large universities. For example, Standford has 7000 undergrads. You can bury 50 underqualified football players in the statistical noise.</p>
<p>But, as the size of the school decreases, it become a more severe admissions problem because the percentage of each incoming class taken up by academically underqualified athletes becomes significant, especially if you just look at the percentage of incoming males. This is the crux of the problem Rice faces trying to compete at Div 1A levels in football. And, it is problem all LACs face.</p>
<p>For example, to keep from continuing to post winless seasons, year after year, Swarthmore needed to recruit and enroll 35 football players each year. That's 10% of the incoming freshman class (and probably the full allotment of low-stat enrollees) -- just for one sport. For what? A team that set the all-time NCAA record for consecutive losses?</p>
<p>The options are clearly outline in the Rice report. The status quo is not really working. So the university has to either make a substantial increase in an already heavy investment in football ($$$, admissions capital) to buck the odds and field a competitive team or consider whether the program can continue to exist at the current level. Rice has the option of moving to Division III. Swarthmore was already in Division III and had nowhere else to go. They had tried the heavy emphasis on football back in the early 1980s with some success, but were unhappy with the team's isolation from and poor fit with the campus community.</p>