ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701280118
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: GEOFF SEAMANS
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
TWO years in a row, Virginia Tech's football team has played in major postseason events named after agricultural products.
Forget 'em. In most of America, fairly or not, the image that lingers about Tech isn't of a school whose teams went to the Sugar and Orange bowls, but of a school that wins a lot of games with players who get in trouble with the law.
Tech's football program has been, in short, a public-relations disaster.
Nor is that the worst of it. The ludicrous extremes to which some otherwise highly intelligent people go to defend patently indefensible behavior reflects an insidious corruption of university mores. Players who don't get into trouble are unjustly tarred by those who do. The university is tarred.
Among other steps to remedy the problems, Tech officials have said they plan to study successful football programs elsewhere. Great idea - provided success is not defined too narrowly.
Penn State is frequently cited as an appropriate model for Tech.
To be sure, Penn State football has an enviable record, both on the field and off. The team wins games with genuine students who don't get into trouble. Also, Penn State is, like Tech, a state land-grant university.
Unlike Tech, however, Penn State is the dominant football-playing public university in a populous multistate region. For Penn State, the pool of prospective players is so large that finding sufficient numbers who are both solid student-citizens and superior athletes is a relatively easy chore.
Elsewhere, including at Tech, it's harder. So, often, are the choices. Sign (a) the superior player who's a borderline student-citizen, or (b) the solid student-citizen who's a merely good player? The correct choice is (b). Apparently, however, it isn't always the choice that's made.
Tech should look at several models of successful football programs. Three suggestions:
* For boldness of vision, Washington and Lee University.
For many years, W&L competed at what was then the highest level of college athletics, sharing Southern Conference membership with Tech. Then, in the 1950s, a highly publicized cheating scandal among W&L athletes so thoroughly embarrassed the school that it jettisoned big-time sports. Football once more was a student activity, no longer a commercial enterprise. Problem solved, and W&L has developed into one of the top liberal-arts colleges in America.
Should Tech do the same? Perhaps not. Unlike Tech, W&L is small and private; eventually, it probably would have had to trim its athletic sails anyway. But Tech should bring to its deliberations the same kind of openmindedness that enabled W&L, four decades ago, to make a drastic change.
* For a proper priority, the University of Virginia.
Alas, UVa is also no stranger to legal entanglements among its athletes. That's bad. What's good is that UVa continues to be a national leader in graduating its players.
Sure, UVa this past season had to settle for a lesser bowl not named after a botanical product; one of UVa's regular-season losses was to Tech. But that's trivial compared with this: Of footballers who entered UVa from the 1986-87 through the 1989-90 school years, 76 percent had graduated by 1996. Moreover, the graduation rates for African-American footballers was slightly higher (78 percent) than for the team overall.
The figures for Tech - an overall graduation rate of 55 percent overall, a rate of 45 percent for African-American players - are not godawful. Neither, however, are they the mark of a quality program.
* For a salutary lesson, Northwestern University.
Like Tech, Northwestern has gone two years in a row to major bowls (Rose and Citrus) named after agricultural, or at least botanical, products. In Northwestern's case, this is proof you can adhere to top academic standards and still win games at the highest levels of college football. But it doesn't happen often: For most of the past umpteen years, Northwestern has resided at the bottom of the Big 10 standings.
Tech is not Northwestern, a private institution with Ivy League-like admission standards. But the lesson applies: Don't let occasional Top 10 appearances foster unrealistic expectations.
Winning teams are nice, if the cost is reasonable. But if the cost is too high, successful programs don't pay it.
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