<p>Student athletes at Duke are some of the smartest athletes in the nation overall. This is necessary since an entire TEN PERCENT of the student body participates in a varsity sport. Having said this, recruited athletes most definitely do not have to have as an impressive academic record as their non-athlete counterparts. It varies by *greatly *by sport, though. Football and basketball will make more of an exception than swimming and golf. </p>
<p>Most NCAA football programs from BCS conferences will accept anybody with the minimum NCAA SAT/ACT, which is 820 and 17, if they are a fantastic recruit. Duke’s standards for the absolute best football players (e.g. those recruited by the Oklahomas of the college football world as in DT Vince Oghobaase who had a 1020 SAT with 3.6 GPA) is 1000 and a 3.0+ GPA. The vast majority of the team, however, is 1100+ and a sizeable portion is 1200+. This is still much much lower than the rest of the student body, but much higher than typical football programs. Basketball, likewise, is pretty flexible if you are an elite recruit. The rest of the sports, though, are not so nice and require significant academic standards unless you are like the best person in the nation at a particular sport. Coaches do have significant power to persuade the admissions committee though if they really want you. </p>
<p>Duke has had a ton of academic All-Americans and the athletes represent the university very well on and off the field/court. But obviously they are given some leeway in regards to their academic record since they have exhibited such excellence in a sport in order to be recruited by Duke, a perennial sports power.</p>
<p>RE: TarHeel2007; if you’re going to insult SheldEn Williams, at least spell his name right! Doesn’t show much about your academic abilities 
Also, it wasn’t Lewis that got suspended for plagiarism, it was Asack. Obviously basketball and football are the exceptions. There are only 3 b-ball recruits a year, so this isn’t a sizeable number. Football has perhaps slightly higher standards than basketball just because there are so many more of them and they aren’t as sought after in their respective sport. Also, current Duke center Brian Zoubek is super smart and got like a 1400 on his SATs. His final choices were Stanford, Princeton, and Duke. Battier also is really smart. Trajan Langdon was a math major, I believe. Nick Horvath was a physics major. Reggie Love (a football and basketball player) was econ major (or took a bunch of econ courses) and turned down working for Goldman Sachs to be Barack Obama’s “body man.” So there are some smart b-ball players around.</p>