PoconoPony wrote:Bottom line is that we frequently get into trouble over kids who are marginal and/or who are not academic qualifiers. There were big battles on this board a few year back when JJ kept trying to sneak in kids who were not qualifiers and then place the blame on SMU and the fall out from kids not admitted then showing up for summer practice. We could eliminate 80% of our problems by just setting the academic standards for the coaches to understand and then recruit accordingly. Seems like we seldom hear about academic issues with Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Stanford, Boston College, Wake Forest which are institutions with whom we should compare. We appear to have the inferiority complex that we need to do anything including the recruitment of academically unqualified kids in order to compete.
Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford and Northwestern are in a different league academically than SMU. I'm a proud SMU alum but I tire of some of the unrealistic "academic peer" associations I see brought up on this board as they are more often than not wishful thinking. SMU is academically similar to private schools like Tulane, Boston College, Tulsa, BYU and maybe Wake Forrest.