Student Athletes

The man has been around football all his life. He has coached it at every level. I asked him to speak frankly about the current rage to make scholars out of collegiate athletes.

I do no necessarily agree or disagree with his viewpoints. However, I thought anonymity would encourage his frankness.

"You know what's the silliest part of this whole thing? It's all this talk about how many players such-and-such coach has to graduate."

"It's not the coaches job to lead his players around to class. Oh, he can make them run the stadium steps at six in the morning if they don't go to class, but making certain his players graduate isn't a coach's job.

"A college coach has one job, and that is to win. If a coach doesn't win, then he'll get fired.

"Show me a coach who graduates all his players and goes 1-10 five straight years, and I'll show you a coach who's out of a job. They'll can him no matter how many Phi Beta Kappas he's got on his squad.

"There's a lawsuit in Georgia where a University of Georgia teacher said she was fired because she wouldn't give preferential treatment to athletes.

"Hey, most of those kids who got the special treatment were black. They were in remedial program because that is a way to get minority students who aren't otherwise qualified into college.

"The federal government says those kids deserve a chance, and that's the way you give it to them. Sure, they got preferential treatment. Don't give these kids a chance, don't give them a second chance or maybe even a third, and most of them will wind up back down in the country pumping gas.

"Let me tell you about all those test scores and high school grade-point averages. They don't mean a thing. I had kids at (his last school) who made 400 on the SAT's. You'd figure these kids wouldn't make it anywhere.

"But they did. They did because they had good attitudes, and their attitudes got better when they got out of those terrible high schools, and they began to grow up and see the importance of learning.

"I had a kid who made a 400 and guess where he is now? In medical school. Yeah, he's black and if he were coming along today, under the new NCAA standards, he wouldn't get a chance at anything."

"There are too many variables to set a standard all high school athletes must meet before they can be signed to a scholarship.

"Not all high schools are the same. Not all kids come from the same backgrounds, the same environment. Those black coaches are right. Raise the standards, and college sports will be lily-white again, at least for a long time to come."

"I say let 'em in school. Put 'em in a remedial program. Teach 'em high school courses again, and if it takes them ten years to get a degree, then that's better than getting no degree at all. If they don't get a degree, maybe they will have at least learned how to fill out an application for a job."

"In a perfect world, a university is only for scholars. In the one we live in, which is imperfect, it ought to be for everybody, for whatever they can get from it."