Yesterday's announcement of yet another book on Michigan football by John U. Bacon got a lot of buzz on the internet. While most people were focused on the accusations lodged by Harbaugh on so-called "cheaters," I was more interested on Bacon's comment that an entire chapter of the book is dedicated to the subject of how Harbaugh has changed the academic culture on the football team in response to past criticisms (some of which came from... Jim Harbaugh).
Since Harbaugh arrived, I have been curious to track what changes he might make on the academic side of the football team. The University has been criticized in the past for operating "safe harbor" programs in the Kinesiology and General Studies programs. A detailed look into this SEC-Style Diploma Mill strategy can be found here.
Over the past few years, I have periodically checked various on-line sources to see if any change was evident. To my surprise, what I found was that information about the declared major of UofM football players seemed to be disappearing from the public record (such as the official UofM athletic site). So, it was essentially impossible to judge if any change has taken place. Yesterday's announcement rekindled that curiosity.
But, the problem of a lack of information lead me down another data rabbit hole. In this case, it occurred to me that there was one independent source that does provide data about declared majors of a selection of Big Ten players: The Academic All-BIg Ten Team, which the Big Ten Conference publishes in December. I found this list for 2018 to be particularly interesting. My analysis of the data is found below.
On its face, if you just count the players on the list for football, the raw numbers look like this:
Northwestern = 59
Michigan = 47
Wisconsin = 37
Nebraska = 36
Iowa = 33
Illinois = 32
MSU = 30
(other schools: 17-29)
So, Northwestern is on top (no surprise) while the Harvard of Washtenaw County is in second. Wow, Harbaugh must have really cleaned up academics in Ann Arbor! Let's call Mr. Bacon and get him to write another totally objective book on the subject!
But... not so fast. Some of those names on the list don't sound too familiar... Since I already have a database of Big Ten recruits back to 2007, I went ahead and cross-checked the All-Big Ten list with my list of players who signed with each school. If you only count players on this list, the data is now:
Northwestern = 33 (56% of the total)
Minnesota = 22 (56%)
Wisconsin = 18 (49%)
Michigan State = 16 (53%)
Michigan = 16 (34%)
(Other schools are between 8 and 15)
So, as you can see, two-thirds of the "football players" on Michigan's Academic All-Big Ten list in 2018 were not recruited out of high school. (I should also note that I did correct for walk-ons like Cole Chewins and Jordan Glasgow that actually play. They are counted above). As you can also see, MSU and UofM had the same number of recruited players on the All-Big Ten list.
As for UofM's very low percentage, for comparison I would like to point out that the majority of Big Ten teams were over 40%. Only Michigan (34%), Penn State (29%), and Nebraska (28%) were worse. That said, the numbers for all the teams other than MSU and UofM may be a bit low, because I did not take the time to error check the list for alternate spellings (AJ Arcuri vs. A.J. Arcuri, for example) for the other Big Ten teams. I wanted to at least get a little sleep last night... So, Penn State and Nebraska might be a tad better.
Taking this one step further, of these 16 MSU and UofM players, how many are actually seeing the field? As a part of my database, I try to track career starts as a metric. This is a labor-intensive pain, but it is useful form time-to-time... like today. Of the 16 players, here is the total sum of starts for both MSU and UofM:
MSU = 188 starts
UofM = 91 starts
MSU has more than doubled up UofM. Furthermore, if you count the number of players who have more than 2 starts (obviously NOT a high bar to clear) you get:
MSU = 11 (37% of the total)
UofM = 6 (13% of the total)
And finally, here is a list of the players for each team with more than 2 starts, including their listed majors:
Michigan:
Devin Bush General Studies BGS
Rashan Gary General Studies BGS
Donovan Peoples-Jones LSA Undeclared
Carlo Kemp American Culture BA
Noah Furbush Space Engineering
Kwity Paye Health And Fitness BS
MSU:
Khari Willis Community Governance And Advocacy
Cole Chewins Finance
Brian Lewerke Economics
Jake Hartbarger Hospitality Business
David Dowell Advertising Management
Matt Sokol Marketing Research
Luke Campbell Kinesiology
Chase Gianacakos Marketing Research
Grayson Miller Management
Matt Morrissey Finance
Rocky Lombardi Business
As usual, the list for UofM is 50% General Studies and "Undeclared" while the list for MSU has variety of majors that real students actually take.
So, why does this all matter? On some level, it doesn't. After all getting good grades in real classes is not going to bring in anymore 'W's on Saturday. However, it does matter when we consider the Giant Propaganda Machine that is the University of Michigan. As we all know, UofM loves to portray itself as the athletic and academic powerhouse with high integrity and standards. However, as they have proven time and time and time again, most of that is smoke and mirrors. They clearly use the academic angle to snow recruits, and they seem to buy it hook, line, and sinker. Just ask 2007 Jim Harbuagh. I honestly thought that we were going to see change. Based on the data above from just last December, I don't see any.
But John U. Bacon is claim that there is new Sheriff in town and big changes were made. Bacon tweeted out yesterday that there were only 6 General Studies majors in 2018, and 3x as many Engineering Majors. Oh, really?
So, I plan to get a look at a copy of Bacon's chapter and I am going to do a little fact-checking. I will reserve judgement until I can see what he actually wrote, but based on the analysis above, I think that I can guess UofM's new smoke-and-mirrors strategy.
It seems clear that the new strategy is to find as many good students to be walk-ons as possible to pump up the numbers and hide or dilute the data for the players that actually play. If nothing else, the "3x as many engineers" comment is a dead giveaway. I did not take the time to go through the entire UofM roster, but I could only find 2 scholarship player and 2 walk-ons with a major listed as an engineering discipline. (I also found 7 not 6 players with General Studies listed as their Major and a lot more with nothing listed or simply that they were enrolled in Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA)) As for UofM's project starters, I did cross check that last night. The result? Only 7 players with a declared major, 3 of which are General Studies.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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