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Pastimes : College Football: Nits, Gators, Bruins, Vols - Whoever! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nittany Lion who wrote (4715)	10/21/2001 12:35:29 PM
From: Joan Osland Graffius	Respond to of 11146

Gary, >>It's a coaching thing too. I agree. Even NW can attract enough good football players at times to play on top of the big ten. We have seen Stanford do the same. I don't think our university football programs should use academic standards as an excuse to not be able to recruit or compete as this is a self fulfilling prophesy. I believe a larger number of the grade schools and high schools in this country that have programs where the kids play football every evening and weekends are largely in areas where the schools are not good at convincing the kids that academics are critical for their future life as a college football player. We go to a restaurant in one of the poorer neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and the grade school kids are playing football next door in a field every evening and weekends. The helmets are bigger than the kids. <g> With this the kind of a program the kids that have exceptional skills for football get discovered. I also believe there is a culture that "if I can play football well I can get an academic scholarship to college" , so football becomes passion one and academics are passion two. This is probably the only hope for some of these kids to get to college. We have seen Joe solve this problem by sending future players to secondary colleges that have a good coach so the kid can work on his football skills and shore up the academic skills sufficient to enter PSU. This takes a special kind of kid that is willing to invest time to play football at PSU, when he could go straight to another college. I think the problem is slowly being solved as we now have Miami with a President that is going to upgrade the academic standards. I think the real problem that needs solving is the kids that want to play university football need to understand that academics are important for being able to get a scholarship to play four years in a college football program and only the colleges can take a leadership role to make this happen. Joan