Everytime I mention Loosening Up Academics The....

S

SouthGa

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annal retentives go beserck. I'm not taking about taking in dead beats and cut throats. If we are going to prove Dave Braine is a lunatic, then we have got to give our football coaches a chance. We need to expand our curriculm so athletes that are not rocket scientist, but ARE college material, can attend Tech. Look at Godsey, all those brains and he is helping O'Leary get coach of the year consideration. Face it guys, I bet many of those ineligible players on O'Leary's teams could get a college degree, maybe not nuclear engineering but a degree. This would not hurt our schools of engineering one darn bit because the requirements to get in those programs can remain the same. Nothing would give Clough more pleasure than to see us competing in the Ivy League. He is bad for Georgia Tech. Everytime somebody emails him concerned about the football program, he slams them about getting their priorities right. The football program IS IMPORTANT TO GEORGIA TECH. Just look at our history, Heisman, Alexander, Dodd, Ross, O'Leary. It is important to the institutions morale and pride and he just does not get that. It is foreign to the man. Face it, he does not give a rats hindend about the football program, he just isn't stupid enough to say it to the media. Friends, we need to change at Georgia Tech or get left behind. Keep the dang engineering programs the toughest in the country but have some majors that good but not great students can study. Get rid of Clough and find a President that hates losing at checkers. As for Braine, that is a no brainer. Thank Gailey but unfortunately his timing was bad. HIRE STEVE SPURRIER!!! OFFER HIM WHATEVER IT TAKES!!!
South Georgia Jacket
 
SouthGA, I'm not claiming Clough has the football program at the top of his priority list, but how can you say he doestn' care or wants to compete with the Ivies, with all the money we've spent? He may be wrong in how he goes about things, but until you can explain that one to me I'm not buying your shtick.
 
Guys, the new NCAA rules are SO ADVERSE to Tech the way they
are laid out, we will NEVER compete effectively. We will beat UGAg about as often as Vandy beats Tennessee...

You either have to:
a) accept that status and move on, hanging on as a lower tier D1A team happy to upset somebody every 2 or 3 years.
b) raise your hand to move to D1AA where you still compete with the Furman's, GSU's, UT-Chats for championships
c) create an easy path for student athletes in sports dominated by lower-income/single-parent student athletes. You might can find 4 or 5 good basketball players who can take Tech academically (and that's all you need to field a good team) but you will NEVER find 18-22 top notch football players who will put up with the abuse that is Ma Tech.

The easiest way to accomplish c) without hurting the academic reputation of GT is to create the "SA degree", the one that will not challenge them beyond what they would have to go thru if they went to UGAg. If we find a really good player who wants to go to med school and can, then fine, he can still major in Biomed Engineering or ChE.

Its a win-win situation. The dawgies WANT us to get on our high horse and say that "we won't dilute our academic standards" cause that way they have baited us into a competitive disadvantage. Face it, college football is a minor league for the NFL, sponsored by the colleges. Its like your company sponsoring a softball team and hiring the guys for the sole reason of playing on your team. The sooner you realize that the better off we will bee.
 
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The easiest way to accomplish c) without hurting the academic reputation of GT is to create the "SA degree",.....

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Do you really think that the Board of Regents which is comprised mostly of UGA supporters will ever let Tech do that--yea right.
 
RW1, I am in strong support of the so called SA degree. However, we can remove all barriers to athletic success without having to drop to the bottom academically.

We need to have a modern and very useful degree program that removes calculus. That's it.
I like: Commercial real estate development. Its ridiculous that we don't have a "Kim King School of __________"

We don't have to be bottom feeders, we just need a chance.
 
Sounds good to me.

Why don't we make the new degree a Football Studies degree? We can include all kinds of football preparation as required coursework so that it does not count towards the NCAA limits on officialy practice time.

If people do not like Football Studies, then how about Respiration Studies? Students can receive grades of A and a college degree for completing the involuntary action of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

Sorry, I do not buy it.

The solution is to fix the NCAA to penalize schools for creating bogus degree programs that do not in any way benefit the kids playing.

Degree programs with high percentages of scholarship athletes (especially from revenue producing sports like football and men's basketball) and practically no other regular non-athletic scholarship students are likely to be bogus keep-athletes-eligible majors. The NCAA needs to develop metrics for determining these bogus majors and penalizing schools with a loss of scholarships.

Although GT's managment school has a higher percentage of football and basketball players than the rest of GT's degree prgrams, there are high numbers of non-athletic scholarship regular students that major in management at GT.

The same holds true for legitimate liberal arts programs at other universities.

If regular, non-athletic scholarship students have no interest in majoring in a degree, then the degree is probably nothing more than a program to cheat student athletes out of an education and instead just keeps them eligible for the gridiron or hardwood.

The solution for GT is even better academic support for players at the Institute and to get the NCAA to add new rules that punish schools for bogus majors. The schools can have those majors if they want to, but if the schools are using the majors as nothing but dumping grounds for revenue producing athletes, then the schools should be penalized. The schools are not likely to continue the bogus degrees if no regular non-athletic scholarship students wish to major in the programs and schools pay a price in reduced scholarships for dumping athletes into those bogus majors.
 
I guess the ncaa feels that not everyone needs to be trained to be an engineer or scientist or industrial manager. With this, I agree.

Playing devil's advocate, can anyone really say that most of the degrees that we call bogus don't actually play a role in society? Take the "Parks and Recreation" program. I would think that Yellowstone National Park is manned by people that have this degree. Is the management of our national parks pointless? No. To be clear, I do not want a Parks and Rec. program at Tech!!

If Ga. Tech can add a worthwhile major program necessary to the improvement of life, it shouldn't be looked down upon as a bogus major. If the BOR tells us we cannot add such a program, there are ways to deal with that.
 
wasn\'t Clough he one of the parties that helped

shape these new requirements?

if so, we are all owed an explanation...why would he sign off on something that so unfairly punishes us?
 
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I guess the ncaa feels that not everyone needs to be trained to be an engineer or scientist or industrial manager. With this, I agree.

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I did not say that all majors not offered at GT are bogus.

I said that majors that are not demanded by regular students, who are not scholarship athletes, are bogus.

Many non-athletic schilarship students major in English, even though the job market demand for English majors may be weak. Thus, English is not a bogus major because plenty of regular students choose it as a major for various purposes (such as self-edification) that are not related to just staying eligible for playing sports.
 
Re: wasn\'t Clough he one of the parties that helped

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Wasn't Clough he one of the parties that helped shape these new requirements?

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Yes, he did encourage the new NCAA rules on academic progress.

Clough probably was trying to do the right thing to get kids an education, but he seemed to naievely ignore the result that such rules would have on schools like GT that were already trying to do things properly.

The problem can be corrected by designing rules that prevent schools from creating bogus majors. Bogus majors can be determined objectively as opposed to basing the determination upon the subjective valuation of particular degree programs by an administrative body such as the NCAA.

The NCAA will not judge one major to be worth more than another major. However, regular non-athletic scholarship students make these judgments in enrolling in various majors without the incentive of taking a major just to stay eligible. An analysis of the behavior of scholarship athletes relative to regular students could be used to determine majors that are setup for no other reasonable purpose than keeping athletes eligible.
 
Everyone, please read the last paragraph of TT's first post in this thread. He's absolutely right on. The only "realistic" approach we can take is to bring in a LOT more players than we now do who are similar to the very best players we brought in prior to the last 3 years. These guys are household names that we now no longer allow a visit, much less accept... The Hill & AA have grossly overreacted to exagerrated grad rates and flunkgate.

The key here is to provide first class above and beyond SUPPORT to these deserving athletes. If you care to get a grip on how possible this and meeting the new NCAA regs are, call Phyliss Labeau at the AA and she will update on you on what is being done and how reasonable it is to meet the progress rules.

Look people, the misunderstood and hard for some to accept FACT, is that many many more players on the teams we play, including ugag, could do just fine at Tech with the proper level of support.

The recently issued fact that CCG has taken THREE exceptions to our unecessarily snobbish standards is hard core evidence that we are not conducting ourselves in a manner to compete at the highest levels (Chan's stated goals of winning championships and beating ugag). He will tell you face to face that he meant those quotes literally, not politically.

One last comment, most everytime this topic is raised some snob come out to say that we should never stoop to level of the ugags of the world. Give me a break ok? I have never since the very early days of The Hive seen a post suggesting such. Please realize that there is a wide gulf between what ugag does and what we could/should do. And btw, while discussing ugag...To Hell With Em!
 
Re: wasn\'t Clough he one of the parties that helpe

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Clough probably was trying to do the right thing to get kids an education, but he seemed to naievely ignore the result that such rules would have on schools like GT that were already trying to do things properly.

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i am sorry but wouldn't u have to be a complete idiot to not see how this could affect GT? i think he either does not care or did not even give it a thought, because you can't think about this for even 5 minutes and not realize that this could be a major issue for us. I think its WAY PAST time for us to be giving these guys the benefit of the doubt.

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The problem can be corrected by designing rules that prevent schools from creating bogus majors.

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why do they need bogus majors? Look around no one is doing a damn thing about this except us. we are completely reshaping our admission process and everyone else is ignoring it, even academic type schools.
 
Re: wasn\'t Clough he one of the parties that helpe

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Clough probably was trying to do the right thing to get kids an education, but he seemed to naievely ignore the result that such rules would have on schools like GT that were already trying to do things properly.

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i am sorry but wouldn't u have to be a complete idiot to not see how this could affect GT? i think he either does not care or did not even give it a thought, because you can't think about this for even 5 minutes and not realize that this could be a major issue for us. I think its WAY PAST time for us to be giving these guys the benefit of the doubt.

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Yes. I agree, although I would call it naiveté instead of idiocy. Dr. Clough's life in academia may have not allowed him to recognize the incentives that his rules set in place. Economic game theory is the study of how people behave under various rule systems to maximize their rational self-interest. The rules that are studied can be business policies, government laws, or NCAA bylaws.

It is pretty apparent to me how the football factories would react to rule changes on academic progress. Thus, the creation of or increased utilization of bogus majors is the entirely expected response of football factories to the NCAA's rules.

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The problem can be corrected by designing rules that prevent schools from creating bogus majors.

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why do they need bogus majors? Look around no one is doing a damn thing about this except us. we are completely reshaping our admission process and everyone else is ignoring it, even academic type schools.

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The admissions process for athletes is a different issue than the academic progress requirements for athletes.

Many of the kids could do the academic work if they want to put forth the effort. However, they often have poor high school backgrounds because of the sorry shape of government-run high schools. To deal with this issue, GT needs to provide absolutely superb academic support and tutoring to allow the athletes that we recruit to handle classwork with very smart regular GT students who almost all had strong high school backgrounds.
 
Re: wasn\'t Clough he one of the parties that helped

[quote An analysis of the behavior of scholarship athletes relative to regular students could be used to determine majors that are setup for no other reasonable purpose than keeping athletes eligible.

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This is a very good common sense approach.
 
I agree completely with you but on a different scale. We should add to our curriculum because we are way too narrow focused for what has become a major university. We are not a small school anymore. Cal TEch has 3000 students?

I'm starting to think that Crecine had some things right after all. Our curriculum is just stupid narrow. My son is looking at colleges and of course I'd like him to go to Tech, but I'm also insisting he look hard at schools like UVA and Princeton. Why? Because they have a broad curriculum and I agree with that.

Now the fact that it would help athletics would be fine with me. I have given money to Tech for 26 straight years but I'm debating changing that. We push rules that do nothing but kill any chances for us in football. And then we don't know our own rules that we push?

We need to add sports management, athletics management (future AD's etc.)if not things like PE. I have always felt that student athletes should have PE or physiology/training, etc. as an option.

I think you're post is correct but change it a little andyou'll get more folks agreeing with it.
 
If the BOR tries to block us then

We need to call press conferences and scream bloody murder foul and file suit against the BOR for loss of revenues, etc. Make it one big long drawn out embarrassment to the state of Ga.
 
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Guys, the new NCAA rules are SO ADVERSE to Tech the way they
are laid out, we will NEVER compete effectively. We will beat UGAg about as often as Vandy beats Tennessee...


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How about that Shiite!!!! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/hugelaugh.gif
 
Mid, that's a great point! I never gave any credence to the "N. Ave. Trade School" thing, but we need to take the Tech education formula and apply it to a broader and necessary curriculum.
By the way, I am in a similar situation with my daughter who has the grades to go to Tech, but wants to consider a field of study that Tech doesn't offer.
If the B.O.R. has a problem with that, screw them. Go private.
 
Why? I really don't understand the doom and gloom from some of you.

The fact is we've always recruited a different kind of player. Now we just have to make sure they're going to class and doing their work. 20% of requirements per year really isn't that big a deal unless they change majors IMO. With the right academic support we should be able to handle this.

We failed with athletes in the late 90s and flunkgate because we didn't give them proper guidance or supervision. Not because of any rules in place by the NCAA. If we can't graduate the kids we recruit we're doing something very wrong.

If Tech wants to add majors or change requirements for some (why does HST require calculus?) that's fine with me. But irregardless, we should be able to live up to those standards.
 
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