Chip Brown of Orangebloods.com has done a first-rate job of covering the expansion story centered around the Big 12. In discussing that subject Tuesday on ``The Herd'' with
Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio, Brown relayed a shot at Alabama he heard from a Big 12 AD.
``I was told by an athletic director in the Big 12 that Alabama's academic standards are lower than all 12 schools that used to be in the Big 12,'' Brown said. <!-- -->
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You can go
here, then scroll down to click on Brown's interview. For the part about Alabama, go to the 6:20 mark.
My reaction: Wow. That's a powerful condemnation to allow someone to make anonymously on a national radio show.
I asked Alabama for a response, and the school provided a strong statement from faculty athletics representative
Joe Hornsby:
"The academic policies for admission and retention at the University do not discriminate between students and student-athletes; the same standards apply for both populations. In one area, progress toward degree accountability, student-athletes are held to a more rigorous standard than non-athletes.
"As well, teams are directly impacted by a student-athlete’s classroom performance as measured by the Academic Progress Rate, so it is in the best interest of our athletic programs to recruit students who will do well in the classroom.
"The APR scores for most University of Alabama teams indicate a high success rate in the classroom for athletes."
In that radio interview, Brown didn't define what that Big 12 AD meant by academic standards, but there's one way to compare actual academic performance in which Alabama measures up quite favorably with its Big 12 counterparts.
The NCAA last week released its latest APR numbers, which measure how well student-athletes progress toward a degree.
Consider the following facts for the four-year rolling averages from 2005-06 through 2008-09:
Alabama's football program scored a 957 for that period.
That score was higher than 10 of the 12 Big 12 schools before Nebraska announced it was leaving for the Big Ten and Colorado said it was leaving for the Pac-10.
Alabama's score of 957 was higher than the Texas score of 947.
Among Big 12 schools, only Oklahoma (962) and Missouri (958) scored higher than Alabama, but just barely.
Four SEC schools -- Vanderbilt (975), Georgia (973), Florida (971) and LSU (965) -- scored higher than Oklahoma, the highest-scoring Big 12 school.
How many times did we read during the last few weeks that Texas wouldn't consider moving to the SEC because it considers itself academically superior to SEC schools?
Texas may think that way, and Texas may be a fine academic institution, but there are two problems with that argument.
SEC schools are not junior colleges on steroids, and academics had nothing to do with the Big 12 staying together. Money and politics did.
