socaltownie;842576407 said:
Yup. I just think it is brutally obvious though that 8 wins is about the ceiling for the program under the current PAC-12 and under a regime that cares about academics.
You know, I'm sorry. I have to start challenging this. Has anyone here actually looked at what Cal has done/is doing on the academic front? First, let's start with that supposedly brutal new academic policy. So the standard for this incoming recruiting class was that 40%
of the entire student athlete population has to be over a 3.0. You telling me that is holding us back? We are working up to a standard of 80%
of the entire student athlete population which we basically already meet because most of the teams already have a very high rate of 3.0+ students. The final standard that we are ramping up to will have 300 slots that can be designated for "special talent consideration". Quite honestly, the standard isn't that much different than it ever was. And, by the way, it wasn't in place until this year so it really has little to do with this eight game ceiling on the current team.
As for the awesomeness of our academic performance in football, our single year APR for 2012-2013 was 969. For 2013-2014 it was 23 points lower at 946 which the athletic department tried to claim in their press release was because of guys leaving early for the pros except that isn't how APR works and it is 11th place in the Pac-12 and I think a few other teams in the Pac-12 send some guys to the NFL. Let me repeat that: [SIZE=5][/SIZE]
11th place in the Pac-12. That is actual data on actual performance, not little press releases from the AD saying how hard we are working. I know. You want to believe that Cal is awesome at this. I want to also. Which is why this crap ticks me off.
As for accepting an 8 win ceiling to get this top notch academic performance, again, before Tedford tanked across the board, we were regularly second in APR in the conference while we were getting our 10 wins and we had increased our grad rates about 20 percentage points. Remember - UCLA used to claim that our APR was so high because somehow Cal had mick classes that they didn't have, because they needed some excuse to say that they couldn't beat us because of academics even though our APR was higher than theirs.
If our academic focus is killing our chances at football, it seems like we are failing double here. Again, they did the same thing with Holmoe saying all along that is bad statistics were skewed because of Gilby, but at the end it was clear that Holmoe was a horrible failure on the academic side, and they had to know that because they had the individual year data. They not only covered it up but claimed he was doing a great job. Problem for them now is that APR doesn't lag like grad rates do.
Some fans have made such assumptions here that when our APR was posted, the APR that is 11th in conference (and again this is single year - no Tedford) a bunch of posters responded with "great job Sonny!"
All I'm saying is if you assume that we can't succeed in football because of our academic standards, demand to see the data. Right now it does not appear to be close to a legitimate reason.
