NoVaDad, it cannot be denied that Michigan’s football tradition is important to the University and its alumni. But the OP clearly meant to say that football tradition is fine as long as it does not override academic excellence.
@Alexandre - Where do you read into that one bullet about the football team’s demigod status anything about overriding academic excellence? Academic excellence was addressed in the first bullet.
^
The quote above is from a later post (#2) from the OP.
I get the feeling some of the posters here never been to UM, or at least not in the past decade
About 2/3 of the students don’t attend football games. Enthusiasm has definitely waned in recent years. In addition, half of undergrads come from out of state. While you can’t get by your 4 years without overhearing a discussion of football now and then, you might not hear of it in class, and you can easily find friends who don’t give a damn about it. Academics certainly is not subservient to sports, unless you major in sports management. This isn’t high school, or florida state.
While there’s a movement that wants to see football downsized, as they recognize the athletes have nothing in common with real students, IMO it’s more easily ignored altogether. Look at the relative budgets - $120 million vs the $3 billion brought in by the last fundraising campaign. This isn’t LSU where 25% of the budget is football
Reality is though that even the Ivys give admissions preference to athletes. If you want sports truly and complete separate from the school, consider chicago or cal tech
I can tell you the annoying thing is when you return home or leave campus and mention you’re from UM, someone else who’s never been there will bring up Harbaugh. To the general public, unfortunately it’s true that UM is a ‘good school’ but they know far more of football than the med school etc. To employers and grad schools though, your degree will be be very impressive, cause that’s what matters to them.
This has to be a joke comment. No one is more disgusted by the salaries of coaches of supposed amateur sports than me, but the fact is a simple choice has to be made. Do you want a winning team and to fill the big house, or do you want a 2 win team and it’s 90% empty? Finding a coach willing to take a more appropriate $50k a year will result in the latter.
The fact is that UM is so loaded with resources that Harbaugh’s salary is like a 7 year old’s allowance. The sports budget is separate from academics and will remain so, unlike the “schools” that charge hefty student fees to pay the coach. UM would survive just fine without football. Look at all the top 25 programs and tell me that academics isn’t a priority here.
@Alexandre @NoVADad99 @CHD2013 @blue85
Well. That turned into a more contentious discussion than I’d intended.
Just to clarify, my stance on athletics isn’t that they’re bad. I’m fine with a school that’s big on sports. I would much rather avoid schools where sports trump academics, ethics, and the law. A prime example is FSU, as chronicled in this report:
Setting aside the question of Jameis Winston’s guilt or innocence, which has been the source of considerable acrimony and is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future, a pattern is clear in this case. Unless Ann Arbor is very different from the description some posters here have given, I don’t think its football program enjoys impunity similar to that documented in the above article, and unless I’m mistaken on that point I don’t have any issue with football’s prominence.