I actually think Clemson folks would cite us as a counter-example to this blowhardedness.
...War. Truly the Leaders and Best.
They got to play what was arguably the third best team in the Pac 12 in the Rose Bowl.
The BCS match up of 1 vs. 2 started the following year.
USC/Michigan is a great school..... Their football players don't go to that school... but it's a great school.
Hence their 7 game winning streak, and 16 of the last 18.
We’ve had our fair share of cheating scandals and the like. I think we generally try to do better than those schools, but there are others (like Clemson) who are winning both in the classroom and on the field as well as we are.
between a school where cheating by athletes is detected and punished vs. a school where cheating is completely unnecessary.
If you want to hold athletic dept leaders like Kelly and/or Swarbrick accountable for whatever culture led to some players and a student trainer to cheat under their watch, that's certainly fair. But if we're talking about the academic standards that the school/faculty has for its athletes, I view these crimes & punishments as an affirmation of those standards, not an indictment.
When did MGOZUL become the Director of Recruiting at UM?
You can googled another article on the Mlive website in 2008 about the infamous "general studies" major that is forced upon most of the Michigan football players.
But don't forget Michigan highly ranked graduate programs in law, medicine, etc....
"Michigan is a good school, and I got a good education there," he said, "but the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in and, when they're in, they steer them to courses in sports communications."
Harbaugh told the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News, “I would use myself as an example. I came in there, wanted to be a history major, and I was told early on in my freshman year that I shouldn’t be, that it takes too much time, too much reading, that I shouldn’t be a history major and play football.”
Bluebloods indeed....
Dennis Norfleet, who was kicked off the UM football team prior to his senior year, discovered when trying to figure out where to transfer that despite being in school 3 years and accruing a good GPA, that he hadn't come remotely close to being in the neighborhood of actually getting a degree because the school just dumped him into whatever classes they felt like.
This was Hoke's thing, not Harbaugh's, but still, UM has absolutely no ethical ground to stand on when they parade themselves as an elite academic school for athletes.