I know. They also have their share of rapists.

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Don't take it personally.

we all get cynical about ND and deservedly so but I think you would notice a rather large difference between the expectations of student athletes at the school and those of the big state schools, even an otherwise great place like Michigan or Purdue

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I know. They also have their share of rapists.[/quote]

So do the other schools. Vanderbilt had a huge rape issue at the start of last year. The normal school has the rapists with no SC justices, which makes them special

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

The thing about Notre Dame is that it is a relative cake walk once you get in for all but the few difficult majors they have. They can talk all they want about how they don't make it easier on students, but when 45% of your classes give A's to 70%+ of the class you don't really need to even for football players.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

dolphin on point as usual

ND players rape imaginary girls.

Come on. Every school has distinguished alumni. Debra McMichael went to Alabama for God's sake!

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Don't take it personally.

you are reaching a period of lucidity just before football season

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

In a group of 100, there will always be a percentage that will be a serious student just by percentages. I don't have numbers but it seems to me that ND is producing a better adjusted and more productive student athlete upon graduation. I also firmly believe that more is expected from them while they are there as well.

This does not absolve them of their problems but in the world of Division I college football, I do think ND is special, not singular, but special.

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Producing the Bears back-up QB is nothing to sneeze at. Was in South Bend 2 weekends ago, got quite a haul of clearance merchandise with the Adidas-UA change.

Maybe a better adjusted and more productive student athlete than Alabama and Miami. I certainly don't think Notre Dame is producing a better adjusted and more productive student athlete than Vanderbilt, Rice, Northwestern, or Duke, et al. What they're doing is winning at football more than those schools most of the time. Notre Dame produces better adjusted and more productive student athletes than the schools that kick its ass and worse ones than the schools it beats. Which is pretty much what I'd expect.

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Don't take it personally.

like I said, Vandy had a huge rape situation last year, NU just dismissed its All America for cheating...twice. I think ND is on par with these guys which is, like I said, special but not singular.

You use Alabama as an example but their are directional state schools who are bad at football but are located in football crazy areas that have sub par student athletes.

I'm not an ND cheerleader.

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I worked my ass off to manage only a 2.3 in Engineering. I was getting things like an A- in Comp & Lit, but a D in Compressible Flow.

I don't know however that your stats are anywhere near accurate. In one of my classes, on the first day the prof came out with the jaw-dropping statement,
"Last semester, no one got an A in this course." Chew on that for a while.

There have been some football players who took Engineering, like Allen Pinkett (although I think he changed out) and Byron Spruell.

This is really a laughable statement: "...the few difficult majors they have." It's been widely acknowledged for years that the Business school is easiest, and it's no coincidence that you'll find a large percentage of the athletes in that discipline. But there are many majors in the Humanities, Arts & Letters, etc. that are goddamn tough to say the least.

Cheap shots. The "following" goes back to when ND football was bigger than the NFL, and a very large percentage of the fans are neither Irish nor Catholic. It's ironic that you mention Michigan as their strident anti-Catholic prejudice kept ND out of the Big Ten back in the 1920s...! Now you expect ND to love UM? They're the most pompous bastards of college football.

It's easy to keep bringing up Sullivan and Seeberg, but your teams have their share of dubious pasts as well. The Mike White era at Illinois was a good example of a dirty program. Forgotten too is how Gary Moeller was run out of Champagne*-Urbana and had to drag his tail back to
Michigan.

* deliberate misspelling -- party school

The admittance of questionables at the KEY POSITION of QB has been a factor -- look at the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, where it's pointed out that the QB set to go there was rejected and ended up starring for USC. There's also a mention of Tony Rice in that same article. Anyway, your statement about acceptance is a little Purdue-biased -- there are lots of top HS students on the typical ND roster who could make the cut -- but one thing to remember is that ND is now gender-blind in admissions, which means that a lot of super-smart girls have raised the bar higher yet.**



I had to take as many as 19 credit hours per semester, and almost never fewer than 15. It's a very tough grind. My family managed to pay in full, even though my dad never earned more than $32,000 per year in his career. Costs have risen dramatically in the many years since.

People forget that Michigan for example has lowered its acceptance standards for athletes -- if you want comparables for ND, look to Stanford. Not the Big Ten (excepting Northwestern).

** I should clarify that since ND is right next to all-female St. Mary's, for many years following the admittance of girls to ND (which began in 1972), males were admitted in a higher percentage -- in other words, some better-qualified females were denied admission to keep ND primarily male. But that changed several years ago, and now for the general student population, the process is "gender-blind." The result is that you will see a LOT of women walking around ND-St. Marys. And they LOOK like women too, something that can't always be said at Purdue...!

No. ND has very few difficult majors. Engineering is obviously one of them but that is more by necessity because engineering and easy doesn't really go together. You can't dumb down Compressible Flow.

By the way, my statistics come from Notre Dame.
http://college.usatoday.com/2013/02/04/notre-dame-seeks-to-combat-grade-inflation/


In the early 2000s, when I was surrounded by a lot more Notre Dame people, it was pretty much accepted that it is really hard to get into Notre Dame and really easy to stay there. As I said above, when almost half the classes in the university are giving A's to 70%+ of the students then it is fairly obvious that many of the classes are the equivalent of walkthroughs.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Most of the players on Notre Dame's team would not have otherwise been accepted if they didn't play football. It is incredibly difficult to get into Notre Dame. Valedictorians of schools get turned down. Somehow though, I'm to believe that there are 20-30 of the top 100 high school players who just happened to be good enough to be accepted as a normal student? That is obviously false. ND recruits have to meet a minimum standard that is higher than the NCAA standard but I highly doubt Jimmy Clausen is getting accepted on merit there.

Cool story.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

My niece was just accepted to ND, but she turned them down and is headed to Evanston. She was one of 7 or 8 valedictorians of her high school class.

In my case, I had a 3.986 (out of 4) GPA and came within a whisker of salutatorian in my '83 HS class of 300, taking all Advanced Placement and Honors -- but my SAT of 1250 easily wouldn't be enough by today's ND standards (I took it only once).

Anyway, I don't think you're aware of ND's growth over the past few decades. Disciplines like Computer Science have taken off. When I was there, bailing out of Engineering was very common and I almost did so myself. The issue wasn't the nature of the material -- it was that admissions did not require applicants to declare their prospective major, and ND had far more EG students than they could accomodate -- tossing more and more Science at them as a stopgap. (My brother had fewer required Sci credits less than 4 years earlier.) The faculty was literally forced to make things extremely tough, and EG intents were competing against Physics majors for example at their own game, causing the inevitable bailout. It's taken decades to catch up with facilities, etc.

I have to rely on my own experience, which admittedly is quite dated, but for Engineering especially, the big percentage of bailouts has always indicated to me that getting even B's was nigh near impossible. It was nightmarish.

As I said, ND has some difficult majors. Engineering is hard at any school. So, stop saying that Engineering is hard at Notre Dame.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I do think it's easier at Purdue, and that's not a knock on Purdue at all. My dad and uncle both graduated in CE from Purdue so I do have respect for the school. My class of graduating Mechanical Engineers was around 3 dozen or fewer. That same year Purdue graduated hundreds.

Engineers are pumped out by the thousands annually in the U.S. My point was that ND made it hell to get the degree -- mainly because they realized they couldn't accomodate anywhere near as many as they needed to.

Your thrust of trying to point out ND as somehow easy just doesn't fly, regardless of stats. There are lots of wild party schools that are jokes by comparison. Does Jameis Winston even go to class or submit papers? I doubt it. Over at USC, Pete Carroll's players openly admitted they don't go to class. There's where the NCAA needs to be focused.

Purdue's specialty is engineering and they're a public school. So yea....

What does the total number matter? I didn't graduate in Engineering, but Purdue is ranked significantly higher than ND in Engineering. So are a lot of other schools which graduate a lot more per year.

Anyways, this is still pointless. Engineering is hard everywhere. The same things you are describing here happens everywhere. They all give the "Look left, look right, only one of the three of you will graduate with an engineering degree" speech to the incoming freshman.

That is a different argument though. Being better than the worst doesn't make you exceptional.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I bet USC and ND share a ton more similarities than differences. The major difference being Southern Cali vs bumblefuck.

It would be a long process to do it for multiple years, but you can see from Notre Dame's offer list that they are going after many of the same guys as the "bad schools".

http://notredame.247sports.com/Season/2014-Football/Offers

Let me guess, all 157 of those players would be accepted to Notre Dame as a normal student?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

shitty grade

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

talk about watering down an accomplishment

I had never heard of a situation like this before. I assume it is part and parcel of general grade inflation in high schools.

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

A person would have to be gender blind to attend ND.

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Yeah but not as bad as the F in Materials Science. Having to retake that contributed to less time spent on "Flow." Gerry Faust wasn't the only guy failing in those years.

Regarding my niece, I think her HS graduating class was well over 500 students. The larger area schools commonly have about a half-dozen valedictorians. She worked hard for it and had a lot of colleges to choose from.

I have noticed your posts are generally chock full of "we're happy for you" statements.

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Award winning post