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usctrojan1 said...
Ah..the Cal Berkeley spin. Come now, you and I both know our universities (Cal and USC) recruit and bring on kids that would never sniff our universities based on academic merit alone. Stanford draws from the smallest pool of recruits in the country - more selective than Notre Dame and Vanderbilt, yet they field a tough and disciplined team.
True, once they get there, the school makes sure their athletes graduate, and remain eligible.
Of all the football programs in the country, Stanford is by a great margin, the most impressive. Everyone else will bring in the barely literate to field a competitive team...but to do what Stanford has done, is simply amazing. They deserve the respect without us belittling those accomplishments.
This is not spin! Absolutely correct SC and Cal bring in some kids that probably wouldn't qualify academically for Chico State. So yes, in comparison Stanford football players, on average are smarter. That said, the MAJORITY of Stanford football players wouldn't sniff getting accepted if they didn't play football.
I'm not belittling their accomplishments, I'm just poking fun at the narrative that all Stanford football players are so damn smart. Like Andrew Luck smart. I know several ex Cardinal players well. Hell, one of my closest friends from HS was an All-Pac safety for them. No way in hell he would have gotten in if he wasn't a sick football player. Will Stanford take a chance on a kid that can barely write his own name? No. But they take tons of kids that have SAT scores that fall 400+ points below the average incoming freshman.
brem22
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usctrojan1 said...
Stanford fielding a top 10 football team, is equivalent to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, etc., fielding an impressive team. They're in that same rarefied academic air as those universities.
Kudos to them, I would rather they be the goal to aspire to than any other program in the country....
brem22
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brem22 said...
Of course you are correct about academic caliber and reputation... Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale... Flip a coin. They are all pretty much equals.
But on athletics? Stanford is not equivalent to the Ivies. You think they would win the Sears Cup or Capital One Cup or whatever the hell it's called every single year if they even remotely held their athletes to the same academic standards as their standard students? Ivy League schools make some concessions for athletes but the 'majority' of their athletes would qualify academically anyway. The only anomaly being Princeton, who would take any lacrosse player with a pulse for several years (see multiple NCAA championships in the 90's). But that's long since over.
The biggest difference is that Ivy League schools do not give athletic scholarships.
"Here are provided seats of meditative joy, where shall rise again the destined reign of Troy." Virgil
usctrojan1 ●
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brem22 said...
Of course you are correct about academic caliber and reputation... Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale... Flip a coin. They are all pretty much equals.
But on athletics? Stanford is not equivalent to the Ivies. You think they would win the Sears Cup or Capital One Cup or whatever the hell it's called every single year if they even remotely held their athletes to the same academic standards as their standard students? Ivy League schools make some concessions for athletes but the 'majority' of their athletes would qualify academically anyway. The only anomaly being Princeton, who would take any lacrosse player with a pulse for several years (see multiple NCAA championships in the 90's). But that's long since over.
The biggest difference is that Ivy League schools do not give athletic scholarships.
What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
scinsc5 ●
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The Stanford secret