the implication of your repeating the quote is that you support the strategy. i don't know if you do or don't, but if you do, then you're both 180 degrees off target. Not atypical of the board henny pennies these days.
i really don't want kids at texas that come with expectation that they can slough off, not attend class and just play football.
there are far too many entitled "fans" around who think that the University of Texas is just a life support system for the football team. Reminds me of slope heads who think a woman is nothing more than a life support system for a vagina.
Sorry, boys, its the other way around. If it takes dumbing down the academics to compete, then no freakin' thanks. Stanford and Michigan and UCLA and Notre Dame all seem to manage. That's the group this university wants to run with.
If the Aggies want to follow the dumbass governor in this state into his 7 solutions academic purgatory, then so be it. It'll be a damn shame, but he's bound and determined to f'k up the academics somewhere. It might as well be where he graduated from.
Not here. No way. Period.
Give the coach a break. Let him put a team on the field and compete before you decide everything's a failure. Get a grip on yourselves. It's pitiful. It's also embarrassing.
I'm not a big supporter of dumbing down the academics to help with recruiting, but you have to ask yourself when the last time Stanford, Michigan, UCLA or Notre Dame actually won a national championship. Between the four of them they have a whopping total of two in the last 35 years. The fact remains that in recruiting, Sumlin can honestly say that Manziel would not have won the Heisman under almost any other coach. Not because of his genius, but because almost any other coach would have suspended Manziel for at least half a game after his arrest and that would have affected his numbers for the season.
Allowing Manziel to take a semester off from having to actually show up for classes was also a great move for recruiting as it shows athletes they can probably expect to do the same. Having "Agricultural Leadership" and semesters away from campus to steer athletes into helps a lot when recruiting athletes who have no interest whatsoever in getting a college education. The alternative of telling a kid he not only shows up every day, but on time, sits in the front and does his work is going to drive away a number of athletes.
If you look at any athlete who performs at a high level, they are pampered. As college football morphs more and more into a semi-pro structure, teams that focus on athletes and give up academics are going to do better and better. The reason Auburn won with Cam Newton wasn't because he was student-athlete. He also took on-line classes, but for one semester and was gone. North Carolina is a good school for academics, but they are dealing with the fallout from having classes that students didn't show up for and were simply assigned a passing grade.
I'm not saying that Sumlin is a better coach or a better recruiter than Coach Strong,but Sumlin does have an approach to catering to the athletes and he is having success. That being said, he also had one of every ten scholarship athletes ineligible to start the season last year, he had a player who almost go the program into serious trouble and he also has what looks like a growing drug issue with a couple of his players getting arrested, not just with pot, but for pot plus controlled substances, so those kids aren't just partying, they are partying hard. I find it hard to believe that kids who are stacking drugs (weed, alcohol, pills at the same time) are all getting caught the first night they ever tried it. One would think the ags are probably following the LSU pattern of ignoring positive drug tests (Remember Matthieu's disclosure he failed a number of drug tests and no one cared).
Sumlin's job is to win. So far, his two year winning percentage is equal to what Mack did over a 16 year span. Time will tell if he is catering to players who aren't focused on academics and who are being indulged somewhat by their coach. The bottom line is that Sumlin and Strong have two different approaches to coaching and not every 18 year old kid is going to choose Coach Strong's approach over Sumlin's.
