<p>Hawkette, I never compared Michigan football players to Northwestern football players, nor did I refer to graduation rates of athletes. I was referring to the high school record of Notre Dame football players being not better than those of Michigan or PSU football players.</p>
<p>Rich Rodriguez is recruiting kids who don’t care about college, class or graduating. He is going to leave the athletic program on probation by the time he is done. I think Michigan athletes can be left out of the conversation for now.</p>
<p>If you were comparing U Michigan to Notre Dame and claiming that U Michigan’s student-athletes were of equal academic caliber, can you explain the large differences in 6-year graduation success rates?</p>
<p>96% Notre Dame All Students
88% U Michigan All Students</p>
<p>96% Notre Dame Football Players
71% U Michigan Football Players</p>
<p>100% Notre Dame Men’s Basketball Players
44% U Michigan Men’s Basketball Players</p>
<p>100% Notre Dame Women’s Basketball Players
50% U Michigan Women’s Basketball Players</p>
<p>100% Notre Dame Baseball Players
89% U Michigan Baseball Players</p>
<p>96% Notre Dame Men’s Ice Hockey Players
75% U Michigan Men’s Ice Hockey Players</p>
<p>Would you like to also compare to fellow Big Ten member, Northwestern? Here are the comparisons:</p>
<p>93% Northwestern All Students
88% U Michigan All Students</p>
<p>92% Northwestern Football Players
71% U Michigan Football Players</p>
<p>92% Northwestern Men’s Basketball Players
44% U Michigan Men’s Basketball Players</p>
<p>100% Northwestern Women’s Basketball Players
50% U Michigan Women’s Basketball Players</p>
<p>100% Northwestern Baseball Players
89% U Michigan Baseball Players</p>
<p>“Rich Rodriguez is recruiting kids who don’t care about college, class or graduating. He is going to leave the athletic program on probation by the time he is done. I think Michigan athletes can be left out of the conversation for now.”</p>
<p>While I am no fan of RR, I think you are putting the cart before the horse here just a little bit.</p>
<p>Again, I was referring to the high school academic record of football players at Notre Dame, not to the graduation rates of all athletes. I do not claim to understand graduation rates.</p>
<p>Well, if you are claiming that entering U Michigan student-athletes are at the same academic level as the Notre Dame student-athletes, then it would certainly appear as if there is a systemic problem at U Michigan. These are biggggggg differences in 6-year graduation rates. </p>
<p>A plausible explanation is that Notre Dame recruits a more academically qualified student-athlete and that Notre Dame commits more resources to helping its undergrads. </p>
<p>The same would be true with Northwestern vis-</p>
<p>Hawkette, graduate rates are never that easy to read. Caltech, Emory and Vanderbilt all have graduation rates of 88%-90%. Would you say that they commit less resources to undergrads than say Notre Dame? I received excellent advising while at Michigan, but as in all cases, students must take the initiative to seek out the advice.</p>
<p>One thing I will agree with is that athletes require additional advising because they tend to be very busy with their athletic commitments and less academically inclined that the overall student bodies. In that regard, Notre Dame is doing an excellent job and Michigan is not. </p>
<p>This said, the high school academic record of Notre Dame football players does not differ that much from those at Michigan.</p>
<p>“One thing I will agree with is that athletes require additional advising because they tend to be very busy with their athletic commitments and less academically inclined that the overall student bodies. In that regard, Notre Dame is doing an excellent job and Michigan is not”</p>
<p>Well Michigan does have this:</p>
<p>[University</a> of Michigan Official Athletic Site](<a href=“http://www.mgoblue.com/facilities/ross-academic-center.html]University”>http://www.mgoblue.com/facilities/ross-academic-center.html)</p>
<p>While Notre Dame and Michigan coaches may try to recruit a lot of the same kids, there are many kids being admitted to other BCS schools like Michigan that Notre Dame would not admit. So it is not a fair statement to say that each school is recruiting the same type pool of players.</p>
<p>Here is one article:</p>
<p>[Notre</a> Dame’s Next Coach Will Demand Lower Academic Standards | Bleacher Report](<a href=“Notre Dame's Next Coach Will Demand Lower Academic Standards | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors | Bleacher Report”>Notre Dame's Next Coach Will Demand Lower Academic Standards | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors | Bleacher Report)</p>
<p>Also. Did you know Carson Palmer was recruited by Notre Dame and intending on attending Notre Dame but their admissions department would not accept him?</p>
<p>Football made Notre Dame famous. It did not make Michigan famous. Without football, ND would be just another university in the middle of the country. Without football, Michigan would still be an academic powerhouse. Michigan and Notre Dame are acclaimed schools. Even if football completely collapses at Michigan, which of course it won’t, Michigan will remain an academic powerhouse. If football collapses at ND? Well I guess we’ll have to wait and see.</p>
<p>“While Notre Dame and Michigan coaches may try to recruit a lot of the same kids, there are many kids being admitted to other BCS schools like Michigan that Notre Dame would not admit. So it is not a fair statement to say that each school is recruiting the same type pool of players.”</p>
<p>Notre Dame needs football to remain strong. They’ll ease up a bit with Kelly. They will have no choice. Too much money is riding on football.</p>
<p>Alex,
For the life of me, I can’t understand why you persist in these false promotions of U Michigan. The facts are consistently against you; U Michigan does not belong in the same breath with these other schools. Furthermore, you attended U Michigan in the early/mid-90s when times were different. Referencing your experiences from 15+ years ago ain’t too convincing about the current state of affairs, not to mention the fact that it completely ignores how other schools have materially improved over that time. Things change. </p>
<p>Anyway, in answer to your post, I think any reasonable reader would view the differences in graduation rates for Caltech, Emory and Vanderbilt vs Notre Dame as pretty modest.</p>
<p>4-year, 6-year, College</p>
<p>81%, 88% Caltech
82%, 88% Emory
84%, 89% Vanderbilt </p>
<p>91%, 96% Notre Dame</p>
<p>Now add in U Michigan.</p>
<p>70%, 88% U Michigan</p>
<p>It’s obvious where the difference is. </p>
<p>However, my original point was about the relative graduation rates for the student-athletes. The grad rates for student-athletes for Notre Dame, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt are all quite different from U Michigan (not including Caltech and Emory b/c they are not Division I sports-playing schools):</p>
<p>6-Year Graduation Success Rate as reported by the NCAA</p>
<p>92% Northwestern Football Players
96% Notre Dame Football Players
91% Vanderbilt Football Players
71% U Michigan Football Players</p>
<p>92% Northwestern Men’s Basketball Players
100% Notre Dame Men’s Basketball Players
85% Vanderbilt Men’s Basketball Players
44% U Michigan Men’s Basketball Players</p>
<p>100% Northwestern Women’s Basketball Players
100% Notre Dame Women’s Basketball Players
100% Vanderbilt Women’s Basketball Players
50% U Michigan Women’s Basketball Players</p>
<p>100% Northwestern Baseball Players
100% Notre Dame Baseball Players
94% Vanderbilt Baseball Players
89% U Michigan Baseball Players</p>
<p>It’s extremely clear which college is the outlier and doesn’t belong in this group. Yours.</p>
<p>Short answer–NO. Just the opposite–near term sports success has been more tied to improved student quality than less.</p>
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<p>It’s just not true that Michigan gets most of its football recruits in-state. This hasn’t been true for many years. Here’s where this year’s Michigan recruiting class comes from:</p>
<p>Michigan 4
Ohio 11
Florida 3
Pennsylvania 3
Louisiana 2
Maryland 1
South Carolina 1
Texas 1
Wisconsin 1</p>
<p>And one of the “Michigan” kids transferred from a Florida school to Ann Arbor Pioneer HS for his senior season, to play in the shadow of the Big House and “acclimate himself,” as he put it, in preparation for playing at Michigan. Michigan has recruited Ohio and Pennsylvania heavily for years, often in heated competition with OSU and PSU. Joe Paterno reportedly still has a grudge against Michigan for recruiting QB Chad Henne (now with the Miami Dolphins) out from under him—especially since Henne beat Penn State 4 straight years. And in the last decade or more Michigan has recruited heavily in Florida and other southeastern states, as well as Texas and California.</p>
<p>As for football graduation rates, it’s grossly misleading to imply that all those who don’t graduate are academic failures. Some kids in the top programs do turn pro before they’ve exhausted their college eligibility; they count against the graduation rate. This year there were 53 early entrants in the NFL draft, almost all of them from football powerhouses. They didn’t all get drafted, but most did; that’s almost 1 in every 4 players drafted. If a kid really wants to play pro football and he has the talent to get himself on an NFL roster and make a good living playing on Sundays, it’s tough to advise him not to do it, especially since he risks a career-ending injury playing for a scholarship on Saturdays. </p>
<p>Also counting against the graduation rate are kids who transfer to other schools in good academic standing because it becomes clear they’re not going to get the playing time they expected—either because they’re beat out for the starting job by a kid with more talent, or, for example, when there’s a coaching change and they find their skills just don’t match up with the new coach’s scheme. Sometimes they transfer because they don’t like the weather. In a typical football recruiting class of 21 scholarship athletes, all it takes is 1 or 2 to go pro early (Michigan had 1 in 2010, none in 2009, and 2 in 2008) and another 3 or 4 to transfer to other schools (which generally requires that you leave in good academic standing), and you’re down around a 70-75% graduation rate. Michigan lost a lot of high-profile transfers in the transition to Rich Rod’s spread offense, including QB Ryan Mallett (Arkansas), OG Justin Boren (Ohio State), RB Sam McGuffie (Rice), WR Toney Clemons (Colorado), QB Steven Threet (Arizona State), as well as several less heralded players like OT Dann O’Neill (Western Michigan), OG Kurt Wermers (Ball State), and I believe several others. That’s an unusually large number of transfers; but 3 or 4 over a 4-year period in a 21-person recruiting class is not at all unusual. Many of these transfers will graduate at other schools. All will count against their original school’s graduation rate. </p>
<p>That’s not to say all the non-graduates are academic whizzes; some do become academically ineligible. But the percentage who become academically ineligible, leave school for academic reasons, or simply quit—i.e., the total number of non-graduating recruits, less early NFL draft entrants and transfers in good academic standing, all divided by the size of the recruiting class—would be a much better indicator of how well the school is doing by its student-athletes academically than the graduation rate, which can be very misleading.</p>
<p>bc,
I don’t think you understand the NCAA data. It makes allowances for student-athletes who opt to go pro and for students who transfer. In neither instance is the rate negatively impacted if the student would have been academically eligible to compete. The full description is "the GSR measures graduation rates at Division I institutions and includes students transferring into the institutions. The GSR also allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.'</p>
<p>[Division</a> I Graduation Success Rate / Division II Academic Success Rate - NCAA.org](<a href=“NCAA.org - Official Athletics Website”>NCAA.org - Official Athletics Website)</p>
<p>^ Fair enough, hawkette, I’ve never looked at the way the NCAA calculates GSR which is very different from the graduation rate. But as I look at the data you link to, several things stand out. First, this is looking in the rear-view mirror; the data are aggregates of the 1999-2002 entering cohorts, so it includes stuff that was going on a decade ago or more. Second, it’s still a very small N. In a typical football recruiting class of 21, losing just a couple of kids can have a huge impact (a 10% swing) in your GSR. People sometimes talk and write about this a little breathlessly as if hundreds of kids were involved. Not so. But by the same token, just a few more graduates can bring your GSR way up. Michigan reports that their GSR for all student-athletes went from 68% in 2000 to 84% in 2008. That’s quite an improvement. Not sure exactly where football fits into that, but here are the numbers they report for the football class that entered in 2002—athletes who would have exhausted their eligibility in 2006, or 2007 if they red-shirted:</p>
<p>Total in class: 21
Left team prior to exhausting eligibility: 6, of which 4 transferred in good academic standing and 2 “quit”
Exhausted eligibility: 15, of whom 13 graduated</p>
<p>Now if I understand the GSR correctly, you can exclude those who transferred in good academic standard from the total. That leaves 13 out of 17 (76.5%) graduating. But what about the 2 who “quit”? According to the NCAA, you can also exclude them if they were in good academic standing when they left (quoting: “subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have remained academically eligible to compete had they remained”). That would push the GSR for this class up to 86.7%. Of course, we don’t know from the data Michigan provides whether these athletes “quit” because they became academically ineligible, or for other reasons like lack of playing time, violations of team rules, didn’t like the weather, had a falling out with the coach, whatever. But we’re talking about 2 kids here, for gosh sakes; that’s the difference between a GSR in the mid-70s and a GSR in the mid-80s. </p>
<p>And by national standards a GSR in the 70s is actually pretty good; for all FBS-level Division I football schools, it’s somewhere in the mid-50s.</p>
<p>[Hughes</a> named director of U-M Academic Success Program](<a href=“http://www.ur.umich.edu/0809/Mar23_09/26.php]Hughes”>http://www.ur.umich.edu/0809/Mar23_09/26.php)</p>
<p>I see Provost Sullivan was involved in that article. She is leaving Michigan to become the new president of The University of Virginia. That is a good sign for UVA.</p>
<p>
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<p>Actually, the exaggeration would be that ND and Duke (not sure about Wake) have similar recruitment standards for the revenue sports w/ schools like Stanford, Northwestern, etc.</p>
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<p>While PSU’s recruiting is not going to be national as say, USC, that has a lot to do w/ the fact that PSU is able to fill most of its needs w/in its traditional recruiting footprint (same goes for UF and UT).</p>
<p>
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<p>While UM has recruited more nationally than programs like PSU and dOSU, a big reason for that is that Michigan doesn’t have nearly the base of top HS FB talent like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Throw in MD, NJ and parts of VA, as well as Ohio - and PSU only needs to go “abroad” in order to fill a few positions every recruiting class.</p>
<p>W/ the hire of RR, the focus for UM recruiting has gone even more so to a national outlook, which has ****ed off a lot of Michigan HS coaches (w/ MSU being the prime beneficiary).</p>
<p>But that doesn’t really mean much.</p>
<p>Schools like Northwestern and Stanford have to recruit nationally since there aren’t enough academically qualifed recruits within their “natural” recruiting base (for instance, for the 2010 recruiting class, NU only had 1 recruit from IL, w/ 10 out of their 17 recruits coming from outside of “B10 country” - including FL, CO, LA, CA and TX).</p>
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<p>ND has to recruit nationally since Indiana isn’t exactly a hotbed for top FB recruits - plus, ND has a natural conduit via Catholic HS across the country.</p>
<p>But I wouldn’t say that ND can compete w/ any top program for top recruits; ND still has a problem w/ recruiting top defensive players, esp. in the secondary (some of that has to do w/ academics).</p>
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<p>Graduation rates don’t really indicate what the academic standards are for recruits - and more likely reflect how much the school, and esp. the coaching staff, cares about academics (i.e. - JoePa at PSU).</p>
<p>Yeah, ND likely has more FB players w/ better scores/GPAs coming out of HS (particularly those who went to Catholic HS), but their academic requirement for recruits is only a bit better than that for UM (kind of like the diff. btwn academic standards for UM and say, 'Bama).</p>
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<p>I wasn’t the one who brought up the “other stuff” (yield rates, etc.); the fact of the matter is that standardized test scores for student body at ND is pretty similar to that of Stanford, and yet, the academic requirements for FB recruits at ND is a bit lower than that for FB recruits at Stanford.</p>
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<p>I’m not talking about a threshold that would guarantee acceptance; however, Stanford generally required a minimum score of 1100 on the SATs (2 part) for FB recruits.</p>
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<p>And higher rated recruits tend to have lesser academic qualifications; besides, it’s a bit too coincidental.</p>
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<p>Uhh, how would the admissions staff know who is and who isn’t a higher rated recruit - unless the coaching staff informs them?</p>
<p>And I’m sure recruits like Ricky Seale (3.3 GPA and 1450 SAT/3 part) got admitted on the basis of their essays and recommendations.</p>
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<p>I don’t know where you get your info., but that’s not true at all.</p>