Here Are Some Stats...

...that no one will talk about Thursday evening:

The two schools that will play for the national football championship on January 8 demonstrate that winning comes with a willingness to lower standards. At the University of Florida, entering freshman for the 2001-02 school year averaged a combined 1236 on their math and reading SAT scores (out of a maximum of 1600). Entering football players, however, averaged 890. At the University of Oklahoma, the numbers were 1158 and 920.

The Pope Center article references a couple of other items, among them this one by USA Today that notes how many collegiate athletes in the "Football Bowl Subdivision" cluster in certain majors, few of which are rocket science, either literally or figuratively.

No one who watches top-level college football and basketball today could assume all its players are dumb. They have to master complicated offenses and defenses, adopt game strategies that are far more complex than anything they may have learned in high school, train their minds to process what's going on around them during a game and respond with the right solution, and so on. Dumb people can't do those things very well.

But saying that doesn't leave out the idea that some of these athletes are also semi-literate, aren't even remotely engaged by academic work and have absolutely no interest in a college degree. NCAA regs that require students to have made progress towards a degree to maintain eligibility don't generate that interest. They just make certain that the college will steer those students towards degrees they are more likely to complete or show the proper progress towards.

All of those things the college athlete has to learn take time and study to do so. Add that time to the hours needed for the physical training and conditioning that enable peak performance, as well as games themselves and the travel they involve, you find not too many hours left in the day for classwork. And if its classwork that requires a bunch of those hours, then something has to give, either through exhaustion or performance on the field.

College athletics is mostly a plantation-like system in which the manager-level folks like coaches can rake in large sums of money based on the efforts of a whole lot of people -- their athletes -- who don't get paid squat. Those worthies, along with cooperating university presidents and NCAA officials, clutch the veil of the promised free education to preserve some shred of self-justifying modesty. Yes, our schools and our people make millions of dollars through intercollegiate athletics. No, we don't pay the people who actually play the games, because they're amateur athletes. They're students, you see, and they receive an education in return for their work, so that makes it all right.

Yup. Because there's nothing a 300-pound kid who's lost his scholarship and place on his team because of a career-ending injury needs more than two years of coursework towards a bachelor's of social science. You stay classy, NCAA.