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Does anyone here have any experience with this? I mean stuff like athletes being allowed to miss class, passing a class without doing work, etc.

I only ask because I have a friend who is having a lot of trouble with his football player roommate and I would just like to know if what my friend has seen is normal for student athletes in the USA.

une wrote:Does anyone here have any experience with this? I mean stuff like athletes being allowed to miss class, passing a class without doing work, etc.

As a high school football player I never saw what you're describing happen, but I did see a good number of athletes not take school seriousily and just floated to graduation with their 1.5s. Needless to say their lives probably don't amount to a pile of shit of equal height these days.

Of course when you're dealing with big name, big money programs on the college level you can bet your sweet ass things are different. Being an athlete may not get you past every professor and every class, but it will get you unfair oppertunties to cheat the system. Luckily most will never make a living playing professional sports, and too will not amount to a pile of shit of equal height.

I only ask because I have a friend who is having a lot of trouble with his football player roommate and I would just like to know if what my friend has seen is normal for student athletes in the USA.

Not normal, but not rare enough.

I have some athlete roomates who work just as hard (and sometimes harder).

Of course, I don't know what it's like at the big research universities.

Though we do have our share of douchebags, I guess. We being the liberal arts colleges.

It depends on how seriously the athletic program is taken by the people there, and how important the sport is. A coach may lean harder on his kids in order to get them to do well (I was in football in Highschool and my less intelligent peers would get their ass dragged to tutoring, sometimes set up with one of us tutoring each other, or punished in one of several clever fashions unless they got at least a 2.5 or 3 or something GPA0--above the standards for academic suspension) or they may pull rank on professors to get them to pass the kids. I think there was a school in Ohio that got a ton of crap for letting athletes slide by on a self-guided sociology course that was mind-numbingly easy just so they didn't need to worry about coursework.

It's not any different than other things, where some fancy schools will try to get those nasty English teachers to lay off their Engineers or whatnot. It just depends on the balance of power inside the school. There's no national Cult of Athleticism that gives them preferential treatment.

All I've personally seen is additional leeway on absences. I know more goes on in many if not most programs, but that's all I've seen.

I've heard first hand of a certain major b-ball player cheating with his friends and laughing about it here at Ohio State...

They're only hurting themselves.

At the University of Arizona Miles Simon took some bs math class (for the second or third time) inbetween the Fall and Spring semester inorder to get his grades back up to allow him to play basketball. Not surprisingly he got an "A" and was able to play the rest of the season as Arizona went on to be National Champions.

At the time he was known for taking absolute crap courses and mostly just worrying about basketball. That year he and Mike Bibby were overheard joking about how much money they were going to make in the NBA. Didn't quite work out for Simon.

Another player, Jason Terry, really played down the fact that he was on the basketball team when he was in one of my upper division history classes.

A woman I work with swears that when she used to teach Human Sexuality at the University of Arizona that she was fired becuase she wouldn't change some basketball player's grades to "A's" after being told to do so. She admitted that the class was generally a semi blow-off class where people would even ocassionally see porn vids but she wouldn't budge on the grades for these guys because I don't think they actually completed all of the assignments. I don't think she was even trying to fail them, just give them a "B" or something.

I'm sure I'm getting some of that story wrong but I also take it with a grain of salt because that woman is damn crazy at times. She seriously overreacts and always seems to be persecuted in some way, or have some new burden she has to deal with. So, since I wasn't there I figure at best she might have had some assistant coach ask her if she could reconsider the grades in which case she flipped out in some way or another and just wasn't asked back to teach any more. The UofA often uses and disposes of professors as they see fit. They can treat them like shit as long as they are trying to get tenure.