Tackle Homework, Forget the Quarterback

Tackle Homework, Forget the Quarterback

To some universities around the nation, football is a way of life. Everything seems to shut down except for the local bars and restaurants that are packed to capacity with rabid fans. You can hear the stadium erupt from miles away.

The university seems to advertise itself just by how well the football team is doing. It’s as simple as this; good sports equal more students. On the contrary, bad sports equal…less attraction. College Sports have swept the nation with their own networks, television shows, and even their own ESPN analysts.

When someone thinks of a “golden flash” what would come to mind? Maybe something like a holy angel floating nearby or a streaking comet across the sky, or possibly this would represent the heartbreaking souls of Kent State fans. Kent State is known for its numerous campuses including one in about every county it seems like. With all those students, one must think that the football team must be first-class or at least on the mind of ESPN College Football analyst, Kirk Herbstreit.

“It can be all summed up in one word, horrendous,” according to student Rachel Robinson.

The Kent State Golden Flashes have a combined record of twenty-three wins and forty-three losses since 2002. Actually, since 1991, the squad only had thirty-four wins and twenty-eight of come against fellow Mid-American Conference (MAC) teams such as Temple, Buffalo, and Ball State, respectively. There are a couple of Golden Flashes spread across the National Football League.

Such big names include Pro Bowler, Antonio Gates of San Diego and Cleveland Brown’s kick/punt/return man, Joshua Cribbs. Not bad for a school that has six winning seasons in the last 25 years. Congratulations to the Kent State Golden Flashes football team, you are currently ranked eighty-five of one hundred twenty colleges.

On the academic side of colleges Kent State, while not Harvard or Yale, has a strong academic profile. According to the Princeton Review’s 2008 of colleges that stand out in each region of the United States, Kent State University is ranked best of the Midwest.

Also, it seems that academics are the most important quality to admission to Kent State, with the average grade point average of 3.15. Kent State accepts about eighty-four percent of all admissions.

Compare to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton in academics and football, it will be easy to tell who would win. To many prospective students a better education is more important than sports. In fact it is one of those things that rely on opinion. Some say tomatoes, some say tomato, some say sports are the worst thing that come to college life others say they are the best thing to watch while playing beer pong.

When looked to see how the top sports colleges are academically compared to those that it looks like it is extremely impossible for them to get ranked in the top twenty five in the BCS. They ended up being as the average grade point average of an undergrad student is 3.44 at Ohio State University. While at Yale the average grade point average is a 3.6 and Harvard business school is a 3.5, Princeton has an average grade point average of 3.85.

Yale, Harvard and Princeton are the schools with the best academics that a vast majority of applicants are denied on the basis of not having high enough grades. These schools are ones that do not have many scholarships to give out based on accomplishments in sports since schooling at them is so expensive. The tuition at Yale alone is thirty four thousand five hundred thirty dollars.

These schools are also extremely had to get into with the percentage of those admitted in the single digits. Out of twenty two thousand, nine hundred and fifty-five applicants Harvard admitted two thousand and fifty-eight for the class of 2010. Yale Law School only accepted two hundred forty-nine students out of a total of three thousand six hundred seventy-seven.
Ohio State University has an acceptance rate of seventy-three percent.

One could come to the conclusion that being as selective as they are these schools would have great football teams but no, the team with the higher acceptance rate and lower average grade point average does. Yet it seems that the reason behind this trend of colleges being high in education and yet low in extracurricular activities ability such as football.