Academic Achievement is restricted to private schools?

According to the American Football Coaches Association, Southern Methodist University graduated 100% of it's 2000-2001 incoming freshman football class. This is great for SMU, and they deserve the award. Five schools graduated over 90% of that incoming class: Boston College, Duke, Northwestern, Notre Dame, and Southern Mississippi.

One of these schools is not like the others: of these six, only Southern Mississippi is a public school.

Twenty-three other schools graduated at least 70% of their 2000-2001 class, and the majority of those are public schools -- including Cal. However, since the majority of Div IA schools in the US are public, I'm having trouble feeling pleased about these graduation rates. Two of the foremost academic universities in the nation -- California and Virginia -- graduated over 70% of their players who entered in the 2000-2001 school year. These two schools are also regularly ranked in the top 20 of universities nation-wide, and as top 100 universities globally. It stands to reason that a student attending one of these two schools is also interested in an excellent education.

When you look at the historical data for this award, things get even worse: since 1981, only three times have public schools won it: Virginia, twice (1985 & 1986), and Kentucky (1989). The rest of the winners are the likes of Notre Dame, Northwestern, and Duke: excellent schools, all of them, and all private, with tuition and board prices of over $35,000 and billion-dollar endowments. These schools are not subject to the vagaries of their respective state legislatures.

Another year, another championship

The Cal Women won their second consecutive NCAA team championship last weekend.

Go Bears!

Congratulations, Suzi!

Suzi Babos became the first Cal women to win the NCAA tennis singles championship.

Go Bears!

Charlie Ward isn't so special, he's just black.

From Ivan Maisel's Three point stance:

Thursday, May 18
1. Take it as a sign of progress that when the College Football Hall of Fame announced the election of Florida State quarterback Charlie Ward on Tuesday, no one mentioned that he is only the second African-American at that position from Division I-A to be so honored. No one notices anymore. Coaches, that day will come.

Well, sort of. Maisel's right that no one noticed. But I don't think it's because no one cares that there are only two black quarterbacks in the College Football Hall of Fame. (The other one is Andre Ware, inducted in 2004.) There are more black quarterbacks now than there were 20 years, ago, so we can actually have Hall of Fame black quarterbacks.

But I think it's probably more likely that no one wants to think about the fact that, while there are over 100 quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame, there are still only two black quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame. And that's still a worse percentage than black head coaches in NCAA Div. I-A in 2006.

And how many black head coaches are there in the College Football Hall of Fame?

Who says USC doesn't hate UCLA?

Carson Palmer: "I hate them. I hate [the Steelers] even more than I hate UCLA."

And all the Steelers did was bust his leg (and win the Spuer Bowl). What'd UCLA ever do to him?

"Greatest college plays"

At least it's got people talking.

But those plays at ESPN are really dumb. The "Bush push" is that much better than "Young's run"? No, I don't think so. And Prothro's catch isn't even in the top ten? (And that's just from last year. What about 2004?)

If I had to pick the greatest fifteen plays ever (or even from the modern era), I'd have included Billy Cannon's run, at least, which is nowhere to be seen on that list.

The thing is, are we picking

1) the most important plays, in which case, anything that wins a national championship in the last minute gets it all over any other play ever; or are we picking

2) the most fascinating plays, the ones that you can't stop watching, even decades later, because they just don't make any sense whatsoever, and you'll never see anything like that again, in which case The Play will always be the Best College Football Play (although the greatest plays writer is a Stanford fan, since the original text claimed that there were two illegal laterals, neither of which matters), or are we talking about

3) the most amazing physical feats, in which case, Seneca Wallace's scramble is pretty cool and deserves something close to the top spot.

On the other hand, if we're just wanting to talk about (and argue about) these things, then it's good the ESPN list is so damn wrong.

Cal ranked in the top 10?

The pre-pre-season rankings have been dribbling out for the last few months, and everyone seems to think we'll be pretty good.

On the one hand, yeah, we'll probably be pretty good.

On the other hand, we have no offensive line, no quarterback, and almost all our wide receivers are sophomores. We do have Jeff Tedford, but he's installing a new offense (or doing a mash-up, or something. No one really knows).

And our defense will be killer, but remember: Pac-10. It's all about the points.

Not that I think we'll be bad, but the consensus is somewhere from #5-15 to start the season. And we start the season at Tennessee. Breaking in a new offense in from of 100,000 screaming SEC fans?

Perhaps we ought to wait until we've had fall camp before we start making these sorts of judgments.

Tyler Kreig and NCAA rule 2005-54

So if you're a college football player, and you've done the whole college thing and graduated in four years, and rather than stick around at the same school for another year for your graduate degree, you want to apply to go someplace else and still play football, guess what? You can.

The NCAA says so, and Cal has a new OL, Tyler Kreig, who's taking advantage of this rule. However, a couple of idiot sportswriters think this is a bad idea.

It's only a bad idea if you don't think education is the primary goal of student athletes. See, you have to have already graduated with a Bachelor's degree to take advantage of this rule. And 40% of college football players (including most of the first round of the NFL draft this year) never get that far.

Maybe Tyler just wants to be on a winning football team. Maybe Tyler really wants to be a teacher: he's taking graduate classes in education. Or maybe Tyler, with his Bachelor's from Duke and a future Master's from Cal, is just a smart guy. Anyone else in the world would love to have that kind of education on his resume.