By

It seems that the coach of a school with stringent academics has linked the Cards with a group of substandard football teams that use the acceptance of “non-qualifiers” to win big games against programs with “higher standards.”

North Carolina State’s head coach Chuck Amato’s comments were delivered after an embarrassing and reeling home loss to the mighty Zips of Akron. Amato compared the Zips, both academically and athletically, to “the Boise States, the Fresno States, and the Louisvilles,” indicating that these schools have an unfair advantage because of their use of non-qualifiers.

Academic non-qualifiers are athletes who initially do not meet minimum admission requirements. While Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) schools such as N.C. State have inroads for partial qualifiers, the only way for non-qualifiers to play is to spend a year in a community college or attend prep academy to bolster academic standing and to meet admissions’ criteria. The “Louisvilles” have lower admission standards in general, so they can accept such students on a provisional basis and provide on-site preparation for non-qualifiers, whether they are an athletic recruit or not. Pending meeting the minimum admission requirements and waiting a year, the same as ACC recruits in prep schools, they are permitted to play.

The fact is there are no non-qualifiers playing Division I football, only former non-qualifiers. While there is certainly great merit in maintaining high academic standards as most ACC schools do, it is also admirable for a university to realize the importance of giving as many people as possible access to a college education. Often some people forget that the word “college” comes before “football.”

What is further confounding about Amato’s statements is that the athletic program at Louisville has actually performed better academically than that of N.C. State in recent years. The NCAA publishes the Academic Progress Rate (APR) for every athletic department and every sport. Considered a better measure of academic performance than graduation rate, it measures how well athletes stay enrolled and make progress toward their degrees. With Amato’s assertions that admissions’ standards are hurting his football program, surely he and his staff can work with “better” students to have a higher APR, right? The minimum acceptable APR, the point where if you dip below you start losing scholarships, is 925 out of 1,000. N.C. State football managed a 933, about the middle of the pack for all football teams. So, Louisville must have just scraped by, right? Try a 952, around the top quarter.

It’s the responsibility of administrators from both schools to set admission and academic standards to best position their university for success given the diverse resources they may have available, not that of the head football coach. When someone like Amato explains losing by ignorantly and inappropriately chastising other institutions of higher education while producing a questionable academic record for his own team, it then becomes the administrators’ responsibility to remove this person from his office.

Coaches get by with having poor academic standards, smarting off to reporters and insulting people and institutions all the time – if they win. Fortunately for the college football community and academia, Amato will win too few games this year to rescue his job. It’s comforting that in addition to building a powerhouse football program, Coach Petrino and his staff, as well as the rest of the athletic department, still value the importance of education and sportsmanship, which can be even better than winning.

Tim Robertson is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science. E-mail him at opinion@louisivllecardinal.com.