Category: intercollegiate athletics

College football: The political game-changer

go-team-pennant-cake-mainAs nasty and divisive as national politics has become lately, isn’t it refreshing to know there’s one thing political candidates can all agree on during this time of year?

I’m talking, of course, about college football.

No matter where politicians stand on political issues — or important policy issues such as funding for higher education — you can always count on them to root, root, root for the home team.

Here in my home state, the two candidates for the U.S. senate seat — Republican Roy Blunt and Democrat Robin Carnahan — are firmly on the same team when it comes to Missouri Tigers football, as evidenced by their recent rah-rah tweets on or just prior to today’s season opener against the University of Illinois.

Carnahan staked her claim to fandom first with this tweet on Friday:

@RobinCarnahan Enjoyed being on campus yesterday and meeting with talented faculty and staff at University of MO. Go Tigers!

But Blunt got on board earlier today with a pre-game tweet that even name-checked Ol’ Mizzou’s quarterback.

@RoyBlunt @BlaineGabbert returns to his hometown to make it 6 in a row. Go Tigers! #Mizzou

How refreshing to see politicians set aside the mud to cheer their state’s biggest football program on to victory. They stand side-by-side with thousands of other fans, many of them registered voters.

College football is indeed a political game-changer — at least on opening day.

Academic bracketology

March Madness is upon us, and college sports fans everywhere are busy filling out their brackets for the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, trying to predict which teams will make it to the Final Four. Serious bracketologists study each team’s overall win-loss record, strength of schedule, tournament match-up, the predictions of experts/media personalities like Dick Vitale and other data in an attempt to divine the ultimate winners.

If the teams in the Big Dance were judged solely on academic performance, it would be much easier to pick a Final Four. That’s what Ben Miller has done in a recent post over at The Quick and the Ed. Miller is a policy analyst for the think tank Education Sector and writes frequently for ES’s The Quick and the Ed blog.

According to Miller’s analysis, the academic Final Four, based on a rolling calculation of players’ graduation rates, would be Kansas, Butler, Villanova and Wofford. “The championship game would then feature Butler vs. Wofford, with the former prevailing thanks to a graduation rate of 89 percent vs. the latter’s 83 percent mark.”

With the assistance of Education Sector’s Abdul Kargbo, Miller filled out his bracket based on the federal graduation rates of each team.

Miller’s post has some other interesting insights into the state of college athletics in terms of graduation rates by race and overall. It is not a pretty picture. “Some schools are failing their athletes regardless of race. Maryland and Houston’s first round matchup has the distinction of being the worst academic pairing in the tournament, as the two have basketball graduation rates of 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively.”