“‘What I was most impressed with was an early meeting he had with the players, the team he inherited where he told them that very few of them were going to earn their living as professional football players,’ Schlissel recalled Monday, while meeting with the Free Press editorial board. ‘And they have the opportunity to really get tremendous benefit and get a fantastic education that will set them up for their future, and he wants to be sure that they realize that is the most important thing in their time at Michigan, and he was going to hold them to account not just for their commitment to football and their performance, but making sure they take full advantage of their opportunities as a student. I was enormously impressed by that.’” …
Wow Dave, Paterno? Really? I personally respect Paterno’s accomplishment and his high standards for student athletes, and I genuinely believe he was unaware of Sandusky’s horrible actions, but Paterno’s distinguished career, and life, ended in complete and utter disgrace, and the football program that he singlehandedly created brought to ruin. I hope you do not wish the same terrible fate on Harbaugh and Michigan. What a strange comparison to make.
I’m not caught up in the Harbaugh hype and am frankly sick of seeing “Ann Arbaugh,” but to compare him to Paterno given what is freshest in people’s minds? Unnecessary.
Not sure why you’d speculate that the Harbaugh name might become equational with a Penn State man connected to pedophilia and the worst scandal in collegiate history. Let’s hope Harbaugh is successful and doesn’t condone the sort of regime that preceded him at Stanford: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/
i don’t find it remotely realistic that football players can compete with your average UM student in class, GSI favors aside. If that were possible, they wouldn’t need preferential treatment getting in. Ask brian kelly about the difficulties to just keep athletes eligible
Might they show up at class and thrive in kinesiology and avoid committing felonies? Sure, but much has changed since Bo’s days. “Those who stay will (not) be doctors, lawyers, and leaders of industry.”
I had several football students in the class that I GSIed for. No favors and they did fine.
Yes, I have friends who have had issues with football players in their classes but we have plenty of issues with non athletes as well.
Though it makes a good story, most of the athletes are decent to good students. Unfortunately, it’s the idiots that get the most attention.
As a side note: getting admitted to the university is a whole different sack of potatoes than doing well there. It’s actually fairly hard to straight up fail courses.
It will be interesting to see whether, and how, the academic profile of the football team changes under Harbaugh. Recall Harbaugh was pretty harsh in his criticism of Michigan football’s academic standards back in 2007, stating that Michigan admitted too many football players with subpar academic credentials and steered most of them at the time into a General Studies major, which unlike other LSA majors had no foreign language requirement. It was widely rumored at the time that the Michigan coaching staff discouraged players from any major that had a foreign language requirement because the classroom time and language lab time conflicted with football practices, training room time, travel days, etc. Harbaugh himself had graduated from Michigan in 1986 with a BA from LSA in communication studies, which would have had a language requirement. His comments provoked strong pushback from many Michigan football alums, some then-active players like Mike Hart, and then-head coach Lloyd Carr. Harbaugh’s comments may also have cost him serious consideration for the head coaching job when Carr retired because many people saw him as “disloyal” to the University of Michigan and Michigan football. Some also construed his statements as self-serving since he was head coach at Stanford at the time, and in that capacity he would have been competing with Michigan for some of the academically better-qualified football recruits. Michigan football has long sold itself on the school’s strong academics, as well as the quality and high-profile brand of the football program. Harbaugh’s response was that he was a loyal son of Michigan who was merely challenging the university to do better. He said since he had seen how Stanford combined academic and athletic excellence, he thought there was no reason Michigan couldn’t do the same.
Times have changed. Apparently all is forgiven now that Harbaugh has returned as a Conquering Hero. The BGS degree still exists, it still doesn’t have a foreign language requirement, and many football players are still General Studies majors, but a sizable contingent now seem to pursue kinesiology majors in the School of Kinesiology (established as a separate school in 2008), which also doesn’t have a foreign language requirement. Is Harbaugh bent on changing this? If so, will he succeed? Stay tuned.
The Board of Trustees perhaps can raise the lowest acceptable academic standards that the admissions office is allowed to accept.
Which is what happened at Stanford around 2001.
It did not make Stanford athletic coaches happy .
"A former Stanford administrator who asked not to be named said that beginning around 2000 the admissions department began to sharply reduce the weight it gave to athletic excellence in assessing applicants. “I think it’s a shame, a tragedy,” he said. “You see it in a total lack of support for the football team.”
It’s not just a football problem. Don Shaw, the men’s volleyball coach who last year ended 26 years at the school, most of them as women’s coach, said, “There were three years (recently) when we couldn’t get a top recruit even though they were great students. They raised the bar without telling us. … It was like somebody turned off the faucet on us.”
I doubt the Board of Regents would meddle that directly in admissions standards. They’ll leave it to the administration. President Mark Schlissel is an academics-first guy, having served as Provost at Brown after teaching stints at Johns Hopkins and UC Berkeley where he was Dean of Biological Sciences. But Schlissel has come to appreciate the important of athletics at Michigan and I don’t think he’ll rock the boat too much without strong support from the athletic department. On the other hand, if Harbaugh is determined to raise admissions standards and academic expectations for his football team, I suspect he’ll have a strong ally in Schlissel, and I don’t see interim AD Jim Hackett standing in the way.
It’s interesting what you say about Stanford raising minimum admissions standards in 2001, but note that Harbaugh came on as head football coach at Stanford in 2007, well after the higher admissions standards took effect, and he proceeded to elevate Stanford to greater football success than it had seen in a long time. The 2010 team went 12-1 overall, 8-1 in the PAC 10, and ended the season ranked #4 nationally after a 42-10 blowout win over Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. That was the highest end-of-season ranking for a Stanford football team since Clark Shaughnessy’s 1940 squad went undefeated, beat Nebraska in the Rose Bowl, and ended the season ranked #2 nationally. Based on his lived experience as a highly successful student-athlete at Michigan and as head coach at Stanford, Harbaugh may sincerely believe it’s possible to reconcile academic and athletic excellence. But we’ll see where that takes him and his football program.