News Flash! A high-profile Division I football coach thinks he can dictate admissions policy to his university!
As I was looking through the news on ESPN.com Monday, my eye fell on a headline reading, “Spurrier blasts South Carolina admissions for denying two recruits.” Apparently the Ol’ Ball Coach recently found out that two high schoolers to whom he promised scholarships were denied admission to South Carolina, and he feels his credibility has been tarnished.
“I can’t tell a young man he can go to school here, he qualifies and then doesn’t get in,” Spurrier was quoted as saying in the Charleston, S.C. Post and Courier. Well, Coach, there’s a simple solution to that: Don’t promise them admission. A player has to earn his way onto the field; a student should have to earn his way into the classroom. Your players are students, right?
The university’s credibility as an academic institution will take more damage if there are separate admissions standards for athletes than his would if he was straight-forward with his recruits from the beginning.
It’s not like the University of South Carolina doesn’t have a system in place to help borderline students already. The Post and Courier reported that 74 applications from this year’s incoming freshman class “passed through the special admissions committee’s hands,” receiving admission. More than half were athletes.
I don’t care if the kids may help you win a few football games this year or down the road. If they’re going to be students at the university, they should meet the same standards as every other student. If you’re a good enough coach, you’ll win with the players who deserve to be there. They put enough effort into the classroom that they earned their way into school. The university’s not about football – it’s about learning and getting an education.
Spurrier says the NCAA Clearinghouse said the players were eligible; therefore, they should be admitted to South Carolina. This, of course, is the same NCAA Clearinghouse that in recent years has turned a blind eye to students taking fictional classes at fictional schools for fictional credit and using them to raise GPAs to gain eligibility. Not exactly up to the standards an institute of higher education should be striving for.
To the university’s credit, it does hold itself to higher standards. President Andrew Sorensen told the Post and Courier, “My attitude is that the NCAA Clearinghouse can establish what it wants to in regards to a minimum standard. And our standard, even for our special admissions committee, is higher than the NCAA’s. If the student barely meets the NCAA Clearinghouse criteria, they have a zero percent probability of getting in here. It’s extremely unlikely you’d be admitted.”
One of Spurrier’s legitimate gripes is that communication between the school and coaches about its standards is not optimal. It wasn’t until two days before he was supposed to report for practice that one recruit found out he had been denied admission. That is unfair to the student, leaving him scrambling to figure out his options.
The school plans to address that issue, however, saying it would like to change the procedure, “which would cover timing of communications and information being received and generated by the committee,” a university spokesman said.
If playing football at South Carolina was important enough to these kids, they should have worked a bit harder in the classroom making sure they would get in. If having them play football at South Carolina was important enough to Spurrier, maybe he should have emphasized the academic commitment the University of South Carolina requires.
After all, the football program is part of the university, not the other way around. Players don’t join the football team in order to study at the university. They join the university in order to play on the football team. And no football coach should be able to tell his school otherwise.