(03-26-2020 01:09 PM)Sactowndog Wrote: (03-26-2020 12:53 PM)JRsec Wrote: (03-26-2020 09:25 AM)Sactowndog Wrote: (03-25-2020 11:34 PM)JRsec Wrote: (03-25-2020 09:25 PM)Sactowndog Wrote: Leave it to the SEC guy to leave out Academics...
Every SEC school is a Carnegie R1 institution. By mandate of the Reconstruction Constitutions most schools in the South had divided disciplines. I think the idea at the time was keep the leaders from different fields from associating, which is what helped build the Confederate leadership at schools that were established prior to Civil War. Of course the U.S. Military Academy was probably the deepest in such associations, but that's beside the point.
So Medicine and Law were the focus of one state school and Agriculture and Engineering at the other. Some states later rewrote their constitutions and got out from under some of that onus and others did not.
But with population moving South the trajectory for the SEC schools is bright. Alabama and Georgia have Medicine now taught at facilities not located at the campus sites. That hurts as well.
But tell me does Fresno State have an R1 rating?
I let your ignorance on this topic pass the first time I read it, but unless you went to Cal, or UW, or Stanford I don't think you have any room to talk. I did my Master's work at Emory.
When the SEC formed out of the old Southern Conference it was for Sports. The focus of the Conference was not Academics per se.
In fact I'd say we are headed for dichotomous purposes with regards to conferences. If a school is AAU like A&M, Mizzou, Florida, and Vanderbilt they have no problem having and forming academic alliances with other AAU schools. Why do they need their conference to do that for them? Conferences for the most part are regional sports associations.
Do you think the PAC has been hurt athletically by not having associations with better sports brands? Might the Big 10 have found better competition if not so bound to the academic associations than the additions of Rutgers and Maryland? Did the ACC learn a valuable lesson when they took what they felt was an academic outlier in Louisville, a school that has raised their football and basketball value to heights higher than they had with AAU Maryland?
So the SEC's 14 schools are all at least Carnegie R1 now. Our research money is growing, and intentionally so, but the requirements for AAU membership have guidelines which were contrary to the state constitutions that many Southern schools operated under through the 60's (so literally for 100 years). We may be late to the party, but I have a feeling we'll be fine in the years ahead.
BTW it was easier for private schools in the South to organize their disciplines so that's why Tulane, Vanderbilt, Emory, Duke, and other such privates rate so highly academically. They of course could afford to be more selective of their students, but also were free of the restraints that were placed upon state schools.
For the record I went to Pomona College.
I was not denigrating Southern Schools and find your history lesson interesting. What I did say was leave it to you to leave Academics out of your analysis. It is an incomplete picture without that factor and one which today does not favor the SEC.
In 2019, the AAU offered three new invitations. Those went to Dartmouth, UC Santa Cruz, and the University of Utah. Oklahoma can read the tea leaves.
And you miss my point. For the SEC profitability is the most important factor in realignment. Academics are a consideration but the baseline for that has now become an R1 Carnegie ranking. So how many top schools for realignment fail to achieve that status? Certainly no school the SEC would consider.
Therefore it isn't much of a factor. And what many schools are discovering is that making it a major consideration is an unnecessary and self limiting consideration for them. The Big 10 has made a nod in that direction by taking Nebraska, offering Notre Dame, and now considering Oklahoma.
The ACC acknowledged it when they took Louisville. The PAC has had a strong academic profile but Utah's admission improved your ratio.
There is but one issue before us. Academicians need to get their heads out of the past and into the present because the dichotomy between sports and academics has never been greater than it is now and thinking of the University as having one holistic mission is as alien to 2020 as nuclear energy was to the 1860's. And in this antiquated way of thinking the schools the academicians serve are hobbled by their inability to acknowledge the two separate and distinct career paths of top athletes and top students.
The "SEC" guy stuff is just a needless cheap shot in a more profound argument between what was and what is. And if you don't believe this issue matters just wait for more court rulings. There are two wholly distinct groups of students on almost every D1 campus and they with limited exceptions are mutually exclusive subsets of the student body, Academic students and student Athletes. Every school would be better off acknowledging those two groups formally and celebrating their distinctions and governing them separately.
I disagree it’s separate but not worth the debate. As far as revenue/profitability to the school, research grants dwarf athletic revenue at top research institutions and those tend to be all AAU schools.
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?...ce&ds=herd
As for the cheap shot, you left out Academics when comparing leagues which clearly favors the SEC. Not sure why you don’t think it’s appropriate to call you out on it?
Then carefully explain to me how and why research grants should limit athletic revenue and how athletic prowess hurts research grants? There is no correlation whatsoever. And research is not even tied to undergraduate studies.
The distinction you are trying to make is wholly irrelevant to the grant process.
It was a cheap shot and it goes back to other posts of yours where I wasn't yet involved in the discussion where you took the same cheap shots. You want to crayfish your way out of that too?
Yours is a wholly baseless and asinine argument for the reasons I've stated. Research grants and AAU status are wholly independent from athletics and for the most part unrelated to undergraduate studies.
My point is that they are tacitly separate and have been for quite sometime, especially at schools where the athletic departments are separately governed under the university umbrella. The point I'm making is that the practice of separating athletics from academics is already being practiced by the Big 10 and ACC informally as witnessed by some of their conference's recent additions.
What are conferences but athletic associations. That was their organizing principle and academic elites have always had associations through organizations like AAU. Is Texas limited in sharing research with a Big 10 school? No. Auburn shared research grants with Purdue over Aero-space research.
We are living under an antiquated construct and misunderstanding its mission in the process. Athletics in 1890 were seen as team building exercise and a character test for students. Shortly after that it became about winning and with the winning came student ringers to play sports, and after that came the All-American teams, the rise of professional sports, and with it a new career path. The NCAA grew to enforce recruiting rules and govern an athletic blossoming that had few controls upon it. Minimum standards were approved to maintain the façade of student athletics and sanctions were employed to try to curtail pay for play. It all failed. But, it failed in a highly profitable way so it remained.
My point is that whether acknowledged or not we have two separate and distinct groups on every campus and the are on different career tracks but both are profitable. Would it not be healthier, more truthful, and more legitimate to acknowledge both and maximize the value of both rather than to continue to deny that Universities are no longer holistic places of learning where the development of the body is part of the development of the mind and acknowledge that while that principle is still true that some athletes specialize in athletics and hope to improve their minds through study and some students specialize in academics and hope to improve their bodies through intramural athletics.
Not all students become top researchers or professors or even career academics. Not all athletes becomes professional stars either. But if we treat the two groups with some degree of specialization hopefully all will leave the schools with job skills peculiar to their life track.
Since many athletes are poor scholarship is their only path to betterment and career opportunities. Some pay for play should be as permissible as work study.
But the glorification of athletic conferences as some kind of academic club is just stupid. AAU should be the club they seek to be a part of and athletics should be regional associations for that purpose only.
I didn't defend the SEC or raise academics (and you still aren't grasping this) because it is not an essential component of conference membership. Regionality and cultural fit are more important and if you knew about the breakup of the Southern Conference that led to the formation of the ACC and SEC you would understand this. Instead you choose to make an argument based on stereotypes and think that my lack of emphasis upon academics is somehow a tell when in reality it is a non factor. Yes the SEC would like more AAU schools but they want AAU schools that add value to the bottom line of athletics which is the business of the conference. Vanderbilt, Florida, A&M, and Missouri aren't limited in their academic associations. Neither is Texas or Kansas.
And as State and Federal budgets are stretched further and grant money becomes tighter, which it is doing, athletic revenue will be one revenue stream that can and should be enhanced.
But like any academic who only knows academia the concept of maximizing the value of both athletics and academics is a concept their non business minds can't grasp.
Editorial note for previous posts and speculation: Missouri was invited to the SEC at the recommendation of a network but only after the initial target to be paired with A&M wanted to bring their second state school with them. The SEC was only expanding by 2 and both had to be new markets so that the renegotiation clause of their existing contract could be updated. Therefore we had to refuse the counter offer of the school in question. Missouri was recommended as a replacement. But there's a lot more to this whole story than I care to print at this time.
As far as Florida State and N.C. State are concerned, neither really offers the kind of value that the new contract which begins in 2024 (or sooner if ESPN bought out the last 3 years of the CBS contract) would require. How many schools can add to the SEC's value when the per school payout hits at least 67 million? Outside of the Big 10, the answer is 3: Texas, Notre Dame, and Oklahoma in that order.