Tuesday, September 1, 2009

#72. Athlete-Students Graduating from College


As SBPDL celebrates the 2009 College Football season's imminent arrival, we must pause to remember why we are doing this.

College football - and the National Football League - hold adult men in perpetual captivity during fall weekends and this vice leaves them incapable of performing any other activity during this time period.

Grown men head back to their alma maters to watch 18-22-year-olds play football on Saturday's and then on Sunday, they watch individuals who have the innate capacity to fail the Wonderlic Test in glorious fashion play an occasional football in between commercials.

College football is big business, as one conference (The SEC) has just signed a television contract worth $205 million through 2025. College football is a massive business that allows many schools to survive and flourish, and causes other conferences to fold up if they can't negotiate to keep their product on television.

Were it not for college football, Black people - especially males - would not be attending historically white colleges:

"Data show that Black male students often feel isolated, marginalized and invisible on predominantly White campuses. Dr. Mac Stewart, the chief diversity officer and vice provost for minority affairs at OSU, says that was the reality officials at the university discovered with the Black men on campus. “We had to do something to address this issue,” he says. “We first started with a focus group of Black male students. They made some suggestions.”
Black athletes, especially college football players at the 120 FBS schools, are some of the most notable people on their campus, so only if coaches could find a way to get more Black people on their teams, then perhaps Black people wouldn't feel marginalized.

Looking at The University of Georgia is an interesting case study in examining the reality of Black people's inability to get into schools, unless they possess the all important life skill of running with the football:

"Since the late 1990s, Black student enrollment at the University of Georgia, the state’s flagship university, has hovered between 5 percent and 6 percent, despite promises by the university’s administration to improve the school’s pursuit of Black students. In 1998, Blacks constituted 6.2 percent of the university’s enrollment. After significant dips in 2001 and 2003, the university rebounded, increasing its Black enrollment to nearly 6.8 percent in 2007. But the number of Black men remained disproportionately low.

"The numbers took a dramatic turn in 2008, however. In the fall of that year, 104 Black males enrolled at the university, an 18 percent jump from fall 2007."

If, in 2008 only 104 Black people enrolled at UGA, that means that nearly 25 percent of that class were from the football team, as the 2008 recruiting class for the Bulldog football team (not including walk-ons) were largely Black people.

While in school, these Black people help their nearly all-white institutions of higher learning defeat other Black people attending all-white institutions of higher learning.

But what doesn't happen, unlike the few white people who play football for these cash making cows, is that the Black athlete-students do not graduate, whereas the white student-athletes graduate:

"Georgia Tech’s football players had the nation’s best average SAT score, 1028 of a possible 1600, and best average high school GPA, 3.39 of a possible 4.0 in the core curriculum. But Tech’s football players still scored 315 SAT points lower on average than their classmates.

At the University of Georgia, the average football SAT was 949, which is 239 points behind the average for an undergraduate student at Georgia — and 79 points behind Tech’s football average. The Bulldogs’ average high school GPA was 2.77, or 45th out of 53 teams for which football GPAs were available. Their SAT average ranked them 22nd."

More to the point, is this story, which also discuss the lack of Black head coaches, as it points out the graduation rates of Black people at major college football schools:


"...report released Monday by The Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. It shows that the gap between the graduation success rates for white and African-American football student-athletes has increased from 14 percent in the 2007 report to 17 percent in the new study, although the grad rates for African-American football student-athletes has increased. While the 2008 numbers show that 76 percent of white football student-athletes graduated, only 59 percent of African-American football student-athletes graduated. The Institute arrived at its findings by reviewing data collected by the NCAA from member schools over a six-year period, using the freshman classes that entered college from 1998 through 2001."
So, were it not for college football, Black people would barely be attending historically white colleges at all (here is a list of the top 25 football programs in 2004 and also the Black ratio of athletes to general students. Note the graduation rates for some of the schools white players... they look a little off):

Top 25 Black Football White Football
Players Graduation % Players Graduation %

1 UNIV. OF S. CAL. 61% 60%
2 LOUISIANA STATE U. 34% 56%
3 UNIV. OF OKLA. 28% 41%
4 UNIV. OF MICHIGAN 36% 58%
5 UTEXAS-AUSTIN 33% 45%
6 UTENN-KNOXVILLE 26% 78%
7 OHIO STATE UNIV. 28% 58%
8 KANSAS STATE UNIV. 52% 64%
9 FLORIDA STATE UNIV. 43% 65%
10 UNIV. OF MIAMI 47% 57%
11 UNIV. OF GEORGIA 51% 86%
12 PURDUE UNIV. 53% 63%
13 UNIV. OF IOWA 45% 62%
14 MIAMI UNIV. (OHIO) 25% 70%
15 WASH. STATE UNIV. 47% 71%
16 UNIV. OF MISS. 52% 53%
17 UNIV. OF FLA. 44% 38%
18 BOISE STATE UNIV. 57% 47%
19 TEXAS CHRISTIAN U. 50% 61%
20 W.VIRGINIA UNIV. 36% 58%
21 OKLAHOMA STATE 32% 52%
22 UNEB.-LINCOLN 41% 69%
23 UMD-COLLEGE PARK 38% 71%
24 UMINN-TWIN CITIES 31% 58%
25 UNIV. OF UTAH 42% ***

Fall 2002-03 FT Enrollment

Top 25 Black Black Student
Student % Athletes %

1 UNIV. OF S. CAL. 6.5% 34.0%
2 LOUISIANA STATE U. 9.3% 33.2%
3 UNIV. OF OKLA. 6.3% 27.2%
4 UNIV. OF MICHIGAN 8.1% 16.8%
5 UTEXAS-AUSTIN 3.6% 24.9%
6 UTENN-KNOXVILLE 7.1% 28.7%
7 OHIO STATE UNIV. 8.1% 16.3%
8 KANSAS STATE UNIV. 2.6% 21.8%
9 FLORIDA STATE UNIV. 12.2% 34.5%
10 UNIV. OF MIAMI 9.3% 36.2%
11 UNIV. OF GEORGIA 5.1% 31.4%
12 PURDUE UNIV. 3.2% 18.8%
13 UNIV. OF IOWA 2.3% 13.7%
14 MIAMI UNIV. (OHIO) 3.6% 15.0%
15 WASH. STATE UNIV. 3.1% 22.1%
16 UNIV. OF MISS. 13.0% 40.6%
17 UNIV. OF FLA. 8.6% 30.0%
18 BOISE STATE UNIV. 1.2% 14.2%
19 TEXAS CHRISTIAN U. 4.8% 33.0%
20 W.VIRGINIA UNIV. 4.3% 25.1%
21 OKLAHOMA STATE 3.3% 20.1%
22 UNEB.-LINCOLN 2.0% 13.9%
23 UMD-COLLEGE PARK 12.1% 19.6%
24 UMINN-TWIN CITIES 4.0% 15.6%
25 UNIV. OF UTAH 0.8% 9.1%

One Black writer wrote an interesting article where he pointed out this:

"On Saturday, Kansas coach Bill Self answered questions about junior Tyrone Appleton returning to Gary, Ind., for the funeral of a friend who was murdered. Appleton missed Saturday’s practice but will be back for today’s game against Dayton. Rick Telander, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked Self if as a society we’ve come to expect young athletes to deal with the murder of friends and family members.

“It happens far too often,” Self said. “Of course once is way too much. Last year we had two individuals (Darnell Jackson and Rodrick Stewart) who had family members that were murdered in drive-bys the same week.”

Now, let’s take a moment to be bone honest. I don’t have to identify the race of Appleton, Jackson and Stewart. Whenever there is a story about athletes and murder, it’s relatively safe to assume they’re black. Peyton Manning’s boyz from the ’hood are unlikely to be gunned down."

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes their athlete-students graduating from college, for, when you look at the data, the main reason Black males are even in college is for the enjoyment of the white alumni. Were it not college football, Black males wouldn't be major colleges anywhere. As it is, Black males are still barely in colleges anywhere.

4 comments:

None said...

Julias Evola - Revolt Against the Modern World :

Regarding the degenerated forms of asceticism, I would like to point out the spirit of a phenomenon that is more properly connected to the plane of “work” (that is, of the fourth caste). The modern world knows a sublimated version of work in which the latter becomes “disinterested”, disjointed from the economic factor and from the idea of a practical or productive goal and takes an almost ascetic form; I am talking about sport. Sport is a way of working in which the productive objective no longer matters; thus, sport is willed for its own sake as mere activity. Someone has rightly pointed out that sport is the "blue collar" religion. Sport is a typical counterfeit of action in the traditional sense of the word. A pointless activity, it is nevertheless still characterized by the same triviality of work and belongs to the same physical and lightless group of activities that are pursued at the various crossroads in which plebeian contamination occurs. Although through the practice of sport it is possible to achieve a temporary evocation of deep forces, what this amounts to is the enjoyment of sensations and a sense of vertigo and at most, the excitement derived from directing one's energies and winning a competition-without any higher and transfiguring reference, any sense of “sacrifice” or deindividualizing offering being present. Physical individuality is cherished and strengthened by sport; thus the chain is confirmed and every residue of subtler sensibility is suffocated. The human being, instead of growing into an organic being, tends to be reduced to a bundle of reflexes, and almost to a mechanism. It is also very significant that the lower strata of society are the ones that show more enthusiasm for sports, displaying their enthusiasm in great collective forms. Sport may be identified as one of the forewarning signs of that type of society represented by Chigalev in Dostoyevsky's The Obsessed; after the required time has elapsed for a methodical and reasoned education aimed at extirpating the evil represented by the “I” and by free will, and no longer realizing they are slaves, all the Chigalevs will return to experience the innocence and the happiness of a new Eden. This “Eden” differs from the biblical one only because work will be the dominating universal law. Work as sport and sport as work in a world that has lost the sense of historical cycles, as well as the sense of true personality, would probably be the best way to implement such a messianic idea. Thus, it is not a coincidence that in several societies, whether spontaneously or thanks to the state, great sports organizations have arisen as the appendices of various classes of workers, and vice versa.

Anonymous said...

So your saying that Blacks are at these colleges for Whites' amusement? They get a chance at a free 4 year degree. The only thing I find amusing is that they don't care about the degree, it seems they just want to use college as a stepping stone to get a shot at professional sports. Otherwise, would they not try harder studying? Yes, in that way I find them amusing.

If they wanted to become a "higher class" they would get the degree. All you have here is some more statistics proving Blacks are stupid.

T Stein said...

There's a one stdv difference on group averages, which may be one reason why there is a lower rate of graduates.

http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-easy-to-understand-primer-on.html

Anonymous said...

@anonymous: Seriously? Do you understand the rigorous amount of studying needed to do well in college? Higher class? the WASP community higher class? NO. All you have here is the manifestation of the effects of imperialism and socioeconomic disparity. If the football players do not do well on the field will they receive needed help in the classroom(like tutoring)? The young Blacks coming to these large universities dont even have the eduacational foundation to make it in college. Has nothing to do with them being stupid. Has everything to do with systemic racism and clasism along with capitalism. YOU are stupid for making that comment. Educated/Intelligent White people know its not really a race issue its about keeping status. Stupid ones only buy into the White superiority fully. - Black GA TECH ALUM