Spurrier rips college admissions policies

EDIT: The quote I originally posted was not by Steve Spurrier, it was posted on ESPN's front page in relation to the story and I mistakenly took it as a Spurrier quote. It has been removed to avoid confusion. What Spurrier actually said is posted below:

"As long as I'm the coach here, we're going to take guys that qualify," Spurrier said. "If not, then I have to go somewhere else because I can't tell a young man, 'You’re coming to school here,' he qualifies, and not do that. And we did that this year."

"I've got to apologize to two young men that we recruited," Spurrier said. "They qualified. They signed with us in February. They were denied admission to our school."

"Personally, I don't think that's the way you do business. I'm embarrassed that I and our coaches basically misled these young men into believing they were coming here."

Spurrier later defended his comments saying, "In my opinion, I still believe we made a mistake."

Apparently, two recruits who were cleared by the NCAA to enroll after meeting NCAA standards, were then denied admission by the schools special admissions committee. The school has defended its policies following the comments by Spurrier saying this will be his last year at South Carolina if the school is going to operate like this.

There are a couple issues at play here. First, not all colleges can or should have the same admission standards. Thats what makes some schools better. Thats what makes graduates from certain schools more sought-after than graduates of other schools. But a problem arises when an academically focused school also strives to be an athletic powerhouse. More often than not, the top athletes are not the top scholars. That is absolutely not meant as acceptance of the 'dumb jock' stereotype, there are many extraordinary athletes who are also excellent students and several top academic schools that also perenially compete for athletic titles(Duke and Stanford come to mind). There are also, however, many more athletes who focus primarily on athletics and spend the majority of their time training, practicing, and competing. For these students, classes often become not only an inconvenience, but a barrier to their career goals. Imagine if a student on an academic scholarship also had to make the team and compete athletically in order to graduate. That wouldn't be fair, as these students aren't looking for athletic careers. Yet thanks to the near-monopoly that the NCAA has on the training and development of professional athletic recruits, we continually force athletes to meet academic standards in order to train for their intended career. This is especially noticeable in the NFL where there is very little international presence and high school graduates are not permitted to enter the draft(and rightfully so, there aren't many 18 year olds that are physically or mentally ready to compete in the NFL).

The NBA has also recently passed a rule that a player must be at least one year removed from high school graduation in order to enter the draft. This has led to a massive increase in the number of athletes who attend school, but after the completion of the basketball season, they declare for the draft and instead of attending class for the second semester, they are focused on training for pre-draft workouts, hiring agents, etc and receive incompletes or fail their classes. Not only have these kids not gained anything by enrolling in those classes, but the team can lose scholarships for the next year because of their academic ineligibility.

The NCAA has been vital in negotiating these agreements with the NBA and NFL to exclude high school graduates, not because they want the kids to get an education or because they don't think they are physically ready to play professionally, but because it allows the schools and the NCAA to make hundreds of millions of dollars from athletics while not having to pay the athletes. College athletics would be much less popular if the premier athletes were allowed to bypass college and enter directly into the pros.

Don't get me wrong, colleges and universities absolutely should have academic standards for students, whether they are attending for a degree in engineering or to play football. But to force athletes who have no business being in school and have no desire to be there is ridiculous. Many athletes end up skating through a communications or business degree while the school assigns 'tutors' to write their papers for them and pressures professors to pass them so that they're eligible to play on Saturday's game. This hurts the athletes because they are forced to spend time in class when they could be preparing for their careers, and it also hurts the academic students, because classes have to move slow enough to allow athletes who don't have the time or focus to fully apply themselves to the classroom work.

Instead, what the NFL and NBA should is create a minor league system. They already have developmental leagues, but they are for players already drafted. Instead, create a league where the players aren't yet affiliated to one of the professional teams. Allow players who have graduated high school but have no desire for college to join and play a 12 game season. Provide them with traveling teachers who teach budget and finance and other basic skills so that when they sign a multi-million dollar contract they are prepared to handle their new life. Also provide them with top of the line nutrition and fitness trainers to prepare them for the next level of competition. Pay them a modest salary and after a couple years let them enter the draft. The guys that made it to the professional level would be better prepared to handle the fame and money, and the ones who didn't could enter college with a little more knowledge and the realization that professional athletics wasn't an option for them and could apply themselves more readily to their collegiate academics.