“I was majoring in football.”

An honest NCAA promo..@andyhre @EssexAce13 @madsal15 @JayBilas @D_West30 @hb_league @RussellOkung @TheIntercollege @patrick_hruby pic.twitter.com/1eF1M4cclm

— 🌴 (@HPalmerBrown) July 25, 2019

Take that, amateurism romantics.

“The NCAA’s primary response to my first report was that students are compensated, in their opinion. They believe that scholarship is adequate compensation for all of the time students put in and all the money they make for the system,” Murphy told HuffPost. “But there are a lot of students who are in the big time college programs where schools are treating them like commodities and not giving them the education that they deserve.”

“You’re obligated at these big kinds of college sport programs to be an athlete first, second and third, and a student fourth,” Murphy said. “It’s a bit of a red herring for the NCAA to say that a scholarship is enough compensation when a lot of these kids aren’t graduating and many others aren’t getting an education that is commensurate to their peers’.”

And that.

In recent years, the organization has celebrated its progress in increasing the percentage of students who graduate, which the NCAA measures with its own metric called the Graduation Success Rate. It developed that metric in 2002 in part to account for the high rate of athletes who transfer to different schools during their collegiate careers ― an issue the federal government’s statistics are ill-equipped to measure.

But the Graduation Success Rate, Murphy said, inflates schools’ success because it credits them when an athlete transfers in good academic standing — but sometimes fails to track them to their next school. From 2006 to 2009, Murphy said in the report, more than 23,000 athletes transferred while in good standing (and, as a result, were excluded from graduation rates). But the NCAA only accounted for the roughly 8,000 of those students who went on to enroll in different schools — so 15,000 individuals, the report states, “went missing,” meaning they dropped out or didn’t return as athletes and are thus unaccounted for.

“These athletes did not graduate, but the numbers account for them as if they did — painting an inflated picture of academic success,” the report says.

“The way that the federal government traditionally measures graduation rates, schools are held accountable for those who drop out,” Murphy said. “But [the NCAA] has rigged their own measure of graduation, so that if a kid potentially drops out of the program, nobody’s responsible for that kid. And that’s not measured in the dozens. As we showed in this report, there are thousands of kids who have dropped out of school who were playing sports, but weren’t counted when it comes to graduation rates.”

And that.

Even if they graduate, athletes often receive inadequate educations, the report argues, citing testimony from multiple former athletes. Athletes, the former players said, are sometimes forced into classes they don’t want to take and majors they don’t want to do, advisers often do their schoolwork for them, and their education often takes a backseat to their true purpose on campus: to play sports.

“The whole time … I felt stuck — stuck in football, stuck in my major,” Stephen Cline, a former defensive lineman for Kansas State University, said in the report. Cline, according to the report, wanted to become a veterinarian but was pushed into a “less demanding major” so he could concentrate on football. “Now I look back and say, ‘Well what did I really go to college for?’ Crap classes you won’t use the rest of your life? I was majoring in football.”

Sounds like a fabulous deal to me.  After all, a shitty education is better than no education at all, amirite?

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Offensive lines matter.

Here’s your stat of the day.

The highest clean-pocket passer rating among all FBS returning QBs (min. 115 att. last year)

Tua Tagovailoa – 141.6
Jake Fromm – 134.1
Mike Glass III – 130.8
D'Eriq King – 130.8
James Morgan – 124.9

— Cam Mellor (@PFF_Cam) July 25, 2019

Bet Jake’s rating improves this season, too.

Today, in journalism

Looks like Cox is doing some rebranding.

I am happy to announce that I have returned to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to cover the University of Georgia’s football program and other sports teams. You’ll be able to read my stories and reports on https://t.co/9C44vhydcn soon. Looking forward to a great football season!

— Chip Towers AJC (@ctowersajc) July 25, 2019

The AJ-C and Dawgnation are beat writing competitors now.  Will anybody notice a difference?

“We don’t have Alabama on our schedule.”

In a good food for thought piece — or, perhaps more accurately, topic for blog conversation — Seth Emerson ranks Georgia’s 2019 regular season opponents by degree of difficulty ($$) as follows:

1. @Auburn
2. Florida
3. Notre Dame
4. Texas A&M
5. Missouri
6. @Tennessee
7. South Carolina
8. Kentucky
9. @Georgia Tech
10. @Vanderbilt
11. Arkansas State
12. Murray State

One thing that jumps out at me is how kind the road schedule is this year.  Georgia only faces one formidable team this season in front of a stadium full of hostile fans.  The rest of the real challenges are in Athens or neutral site Jacksonville.

The other thing that jumps out at me is ranking Georgia Tech ahead of Vanderbilt.  I know he attributes that to timing, but if things play out that way in reality, Kirby ought to be ashamed.

Your thoughts?

Bullshit just means more.

The logical contortions employed by the author of this article about LSU’s new football facility and the reactions thereto are certainly cringeworthy.  But then, he’s just following in the path of the AD:

LSU’s goal, as new athletic director Scott Woodward said, should be to be top notch in physics and football. Perhaps a facility like this will help LSU be better at both. Athletics should be the front porch of a university, attracting high-quality students and funding, not the other way round.

Yes, I’m sure the day funding to attract a quantum physics professor after discovering the football players have easy access to sleeping pods is just around the corner.

Luck of the draw

If Alabama manages to come up short against Clemson again this season and Nick needs a new excuse besides blaming his staff and best players for being distracted by their futures, this ought to work.

Not only must the Tide face five of the top 16 teams in ESPN’s Football Power Index this season, it will probably meet FPI No. 3 Georgia – a team that Alabama rallied to beat in overtime in each of the last two postseasons – if it reaches the SEC championship game.

Meanwhile, the FPI gives Clemson a 92.3% chance of victory or better in 10 of its 12 games. In the other two games, the FPI gives the Tigers an 88% chance of beating Texas A&M and an 85.1% chance of winning the regular-season finale at South Carolina…

Talk about a one-team conference. The only top-20 FPI teams Clemson will face are Texas A&M (No. 11) and South Carolina (No. 18), both of the SEC, with Florida State falling just outside the top 20 at No. 21. The average FPI rating of the nine non-SEC, non-FCS opponents Clemson will face is 63rd.

Life’s a bitch, ain’t it.

Thursday morning buffet

Pac-12 Media Days, a target-rich environment.

• The Pac-12 announced yesterday that the 2020 and 2021 host site for the Pac-12 Championship Game will be located in Las Vegas.  Gambling, for the win!
• Mike Gundy:  “When asked how he would coach his son, Gunnar, if the situation arose: “I told him, if you come to Oklahoma State, I’ll coach you like I do everybody else… If you’re the best player, you’ll play. If not, you won’t play — even though I’m sleeping with your mom.”  (h/t Ben)
• “A four-month external review of the Pac-12’s officiating program determined it is “predominantly consistent with best practices in the industry” and does not need a major overhaul.”  Of course it doesn’t, bless their hearts.
• Secondary market ticket prices for Georgia-Notre Dame are going through the roof.
• For what it’s worth, Pro Football Focus looks at two Georgia transfer quarterbacks’ futures and notes that Jacob Eason has a better surrounding cast than does Justin Fields.
• Herbie describes Jake Fromm as “arguably the best leader in the country”.
• David Shaw says the move to an eight-team CFP field is inevitable because, in part: “If we can go from 64 to 65 to 68 (in the NCAA basketball tournament), we can go from four to eight. Don’t talk about time, we can make it work.”  By that reasoning, there’s no reason to stop at eight, is there?

TFW you throw in the towel on asses in the seats

In case you’re still wondering what the future of college football will look like, the Pac-12 is seriously considering playing some games with a 9AM Pacific Time kickoff… because, Fox.

Hey, that’s why they pay Larry Scott the big bucks, y’all.