BTW, @elguapo1, while athletes may have a hook in admissions (they just have to hit their academic criteria and they’re in if the coach wants them), it would be very difficult to find athletes with below-average academics at the Ivies, for instance. The Ivy League actually has a rather complex system for allocating slots for athletes (https://www.mka.org/uploaded/college_counseling/Publications/AI_Guidelines_Worksheet.pdf) but the bottom line is that athletes on average have to have an academic index within 1 standard deviation of the school’s average academic index (the Ivies boil down test scores and GPA to one number for every student) and only a handful of athletes (out of entering classes that range from 1000-3000 a year) may be more than 2 standard deviations below. And note that Ivy average test scores range from top 1% to top 3% in the country.
At the top academic schools that play at the DivIII level in sports, the criteria for athletes tends to be even stricter.
For DivI schools, the academic criteria for athletes has to be looser if they want to compete with schools that are college sports powerhouses, though athletes can’t be pulling down academic standards at Stanford and Northwestern too much if those 2 schools have average SAT scores that are in the top 1% in the country: http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2014/08/04/top-100-sat-scores-ranking-which-colleges-have-the-brightest-kids/#299797e538a1.
As we can see from the example of Roger Bannister, there are folks who are stellar both academically and athletically.
For instance, Ryan Padgett, who was a First Team All-Big Ten guard on the 1995 Northwestern Rose Bowl team as well as an honor student and Academic All-American (which is an honor voted to those student-athletes who play major roles in sports and excelled the most academically nationally), went on to medical school and is now a surgeon in WA. Sam Valensizi was the kicker on that 1995 team and also an Academic All-American, later got an MBA from Chicago Booth, and now is a managing director in investment banking. A few Northwestern Academic All-Americans went on to star in sports: Luis Castillo in the NFL in football. Joe Girardi in MLB in baseball. Girardi now is the manager of the NY Yankees. At Northwestern, he studied industrial engineering and had a 3.468 GPA. This would be akin to someone who graduates from Oxbridge/Imperial in engineering with a first/upper second then goes on to play 15 years in the Premier League and now manages Chelsea/ManU.