Don’t expect to see Yale’s football team in the BCS, this January or ever. But do expect a Yalie to have something to say about the ranking system — especially the way it ignores the college part of college football.
For the uninitiated, BCS stands for Bowl (not Bulldog) Championship Series, and apparently it has something to do with that Rose Bowl thingie I used to see on TV when I was a kid. According to the official BCS website, it is “the sport’s showcase event,” created in 1998 “to assure a matchup between the top two teams — correcting a major flaw in the bowl system.” OK, you already knew this, but I was absent that day.
Not Lindsey Luebchow, a second-year Yale Law School student and higher-ed blogger for the New America Foundation. She has cooked up an Academic Bowl Championship Series ranking of “those teams that have players delivering both on the field and in the classroom.”
“There’s a false perception,” Luebchow writes, “that college athletics, particularly high-profile sports like football and basketball, opens gates for students from lower-income backgrounds.”
But the reality is that only a very small number of college football and basketball players ever turn pro, and of the rest, nearly half leave school without a degree. That’s not an open gate; that’s a broken contract that leaves many former college athletes with nothing more than past glory that is of little use for workplace success.
What’s that? The rankings? Oh, Penn State is #1, followed by Stanford. Mighty Texas comes in dead last.
Stay tuned for March Madness — Luebchow also calculates an Academic Sweet 16.
