Is the academic perception of Football Powerhouses hurt by their football popularity?

[k_amp_s]

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More exaggerations…… Northwestern has much higher standards than U Michigan in its recruitment standards. Northwestern’s peers are Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and Wake Forest. Not U Michigan.

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<p>Actually, the exaggeration would be that ND and Duke (not sure about Wake) have similar recruitment standards for the revenue sports w/ schools like Stanford, Northwestern, etc.</p>

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Nope. Penn State recruiting strength is the Ohio Valley/Western Pennsylvania competing against Ohio State, Pitt and West Virginia for kids. Many kids come from Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey with increasing ties down the coast to Virginia. PSU does not have the national recruiting that Michigan or Notre Dame has. They aren’t going to get the choice recruit from Texas, California or Florida to come to Happy Valley very often.

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<p>While PSU’s recruiting is not going to be national as say, USC, that has a lot to do w/ the fact that PSU is able to fill most of its needs w/in its traditional recruiting footprint (same goes for UF and UT).</p>

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Michigan is mostly Michigan kids but they will get kids from Texas, California and Florida as their current roster indicates. Sure, they will get some Ohio kids too but to suggest much cross-competes with PSU is not the facts.

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<p>While UM has recruited more nationally than programs like PSU and dOSU, a big reason for that is that Michigan doesn’t have nearly the base of top HS FB talent like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Throw in MD, NJ and parts of VA, as well as Ohio - and PSU only needs to go “abroad” in order to fill a few positions every recruiting class.</p>

<p>W/ the hire of RR, the focus for UM recruiting has gone even more so to a national outlook, which has ****ed off a lot of Michigan HS coaches (w/ MSU being the prime beneficiary).</p>

<p>But that doesn’t really mean much.</p>

<p>Schools like Northwestern and Stanford have to recruit nationally since there aren’t enough academically qualifed recruits within their “natural” recruiting base (for instance, for the 2010 recruiting class, NU only had 1 recruit from IL, w/ 10 out of their 17 recruits coming from outside of “B10 country” - including FL, CO, LA, CA and TX).</p>

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Notre Dame recruits at the national level and can get their talent from any state and can compete with ANY top program for a top recruit. They have to as Indiana is not a hotbed of high school football.

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<p>ND has to recruit nationally since Indiana isn’t exactly a hotbed for top FB recruits - plus, ND has a natural conduit via Catholic HS across the country.</p>

<p>But I wouldn’t say that ND can compete w/ any top program for top recruits; ND still has a problem w/ recruiting top defensive players, esp. in the secondary (some of that has to do w/ academics).</p>

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If you were comparing U Michigan to Notre Dame and claiming that U Michigan’s student-athletes were of equal academic caliber, can you explain the large differences in 6-year graduation success rates?

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<p>Graduation rates don’t really indicate what the academic standards are for recruits - and more likely reflect how much the school, and esp. the coaching staff, cares about academics (i.e. - JoePa at PSU).</p>

<p>Yeah, ND likely has more FB players w/ better scores/GPAs coming out of HS (particularly those who went to Catholic HS), but their academic requirement for recruits is only a bit better than that for UM (kind of like the diff. btwn academic standards for UM and say, 'Bama).</p>