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Working Overtime: An Open Letter to John U. Bacon

Dear John,

About a year ago, when some initial quotes surfaced from your new book Overtime, they originally raised my eyebrows. No, it wasn't the quotes from Chapter 32, "Hard to Beat the Cheaters," nor was it the quotes from your heavily slanted take on the Michigan - Michigan State rivalry from Chapters 28 ("Bad Blood") and 29 ("Cavalry's Coming.") The quotes that caught my eye came from Chapter 12, "Student Athletes," which outlines the alleged changes that the University of Michigan made to the way it handles the academics of athletes, specifically on the football team. 

Some of the initial "facts and figures" that I saw in that chapter looked suspicious. I had a curious eye fixed on Coach Harbaugh to see how he would handle academics now that he was in charge. At the time that I first became aware of this chapter, your book had not yet hit the shelves, and certain corroborating data that should have been publicly available seemed oddly hard to find. We even had a brief exchange on Twitter during the summer of 2019 where I promised to you that I would withhold judgment until I had time to perform my own investigation, and that I would get back to you with the results. The following it the result of that investigation:

Setting the Stage

In order for everyone who may be reading this to fully understand the need for you to write Chapter 12, it is necessary to provide some context. In the first few pages of Chapter 12, you explain in some detail about the academic scandal at the University of North Carolina. Dozens are articles on this subject have been written, one of which can be found here.  

While the entire case is quite complex, the essential facts are that for over a decade, thousands of UNC athletes took a series a "paper" or "fake" classes that boosted their GPA and allowed them to remain eligible to compete. This combination of fake lecture and independent study classes were confined to a single academic department with a disproportional number of athletes.

A certain academic advisor was alleged to be pushing certain athletes to take these so-called "paper" classes. There was also evidence to suggest that this advisor went so far to to engage in grade-changing and plagiarism on behalf of the student athletes. In the end, UNC was thought by many of failing to properly educate their student athletes.

In the next section of Chapter 12, you go on to recap the war of words that transpired in 2007 between then head Stanford football coach Jim Harbaugh and... well, the rest the Michigan fan and alumni base. In a series of interviews that year, Coach Harbaugh put a lot of things on the record, including quotes such as these:

"Schools which have good academic reputations have ways to get borderline athletes in and keep them in... and once they are in, they steer them towards courses in sports communication.

"I would use myself as an example. I came in there, wanted to be a history major, and I was told early on in my freshman year that I shouldn’t be, that it takes too much time, too much reading, that I shouldn’t be a history major and play football."

Harbaugh also added, "General Studies, to me, is not a degree."

Following Harhaugh's statements from the west coast, the Ann Arbor News launched an investigation into the University of Michigan athletic program, and what they found was not pretty. They published a series of articles in 2008, the most relevant of which is linked here. While there was no evidence to suggest grade tampering or plagiarism, the experiences of the University of Michigan football student athletes shared many of the same concerning features that were later uncovered in Chapel Hill, including:
  • A severe concentration of athletes in a single major (Kinesiology in the 1990s and the aforementioned Bachelor of General Studies (BGS) program in the 2000s, which accounted for 78% of the recruiting football players on the 2004 roster, yet less than 3% of the general student population.)
  • A professor that offers several independent study courses, in which the athletes tend to get higher grades relative to their other classes.
  • An academic counselor who was alleged to encourage athletes to pursue this major.
Despite your attempt to draw a contrast between the stories at UNC and U of M, the similarities are striking.  Moreover, the General Studies program at Michigan has a unique feature that was even a bigger concern to some than the set-up at UNC. That feature is flexibility. The current College of Literature, Science, and the Arts website describes the General Studies program as follows:

"This degree remains an option for students with interdisciplinary or alternate academic interests, allowing them to pursue their interests in an individually designed degree program independent of departmental requirements.

The Bachelor in General Studies is an interdisciplinary degree which allows a student to combine subject areas and skills in a way that focuses intellectual development through a lens of interdisciplinarity."

While some at the University of Michigan would call the flexibility of BGS degree a feature, others simply see it as a bug. One of those people is former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt, who in his 2000 book, "Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University" said the following:

"Where else can athletes with weak academic skills be accommodated in a university with competitive academic admissions and rigorous academic programs? ...Fortunately for the athlete interested only in eligibility, every university has a number of courses taught by faculty members well disposed toward intercollegiate athletics and college athletes. Since these soon become well known to coaches and academic advisors, student-athletes with weaker academic skills are steered toward these safe harbors. Since one can rarely find enough cupcake courses to comprise a true major, some universities have actually created degrees such as a Bachelor of General Studies to facilitate such a strategy."

Not everyone agreed with Duderstadt's opinion, however. Michigan associate provost Phil Hanlon told the Ann Arbor News. "I don't think there are any easy courses at the university."  Or, in other words, "Nothing to see here."

The New Sheriff in Town

Chapter 12 of Overtime continues by detailing the response made by the University following the comments from Coach Harbaugh in 2007 and the Ann Arbor News story in 2008.  This part of the chapter includes some quotes from Coach Harbaugh, several players, and also leans heavily on a series of interviews with Steve Connelly, director of football academic services and a U of M alumnus.  

Once again, there is a lot of detail. Primarily, you attempt to make the point that the previous four U of M coaches (including Lloyd Carr, who was in charge in 2007) were serious about academics, but Harbaugh is really serious.  You also emphasize that there is no evidence of grade adjustment or other overt forms of cheating. Finally, you site an improvement in the Academic Progress Report (APR) score as evidence that things have improved under Coach Harbaugh.

In addition, Connelly (and Harbaugh) provided several quotes that gave details on some of the specific changes that were made, based on the 2018 roster.  Those include:
  • Connelly said, "I have no problem with students taking any of our majors, including BSG. We don't have any phony diplomas here."
  • "On the 2018 team, only 6 were in the BGS program"
  • There is now a "hard and fast policy" that prevent counselors from discouraging athletes from taking any specific major.
  • A new policy is in place to limit the number of independent study classes a student athlete can take.
  • "In 2010, they [Connelly's department] started tracking the player's majors, with good results."
  • "In the Fall of 2018 the [60-70] football upperclassmen were pursuing 31 different degree programs."
  • Coach Harbaugh was quoted as saying, "we have 16 to 20 engineering students on the team, depending on how you count them."
In addition to the points above, Connelly also gave a few examples of famous Michigan alumni who also graduated from the General Studies program, including current athletic director (and former football player) Warde Manuel. Essentially, the message in the back half of Chapter 12 is that problems may have existed in the past, they all were fixed, and once again "there is nothing to see here."  

Reality Check

As I mentioned above, when I first saw some of the preliminary numbers listed above floating around the internet, my curiosity was piqued. I am a "data person" and one of my current hobbies is the analysis of sports data, which sometimes includes recruiting information. As a part of this hobby, I have assembled a football recruiting database that includes all sorts of information from public sources.  One of the pieces of data that I sometimes collect is the declared major of each student athlete.

Around 2015, I ran into a problem while researching U of M's players. In the past, it was straightforward to extract declared major information from the bios listed on the U of M Athletic Department website. Starting right around the time Harbaugh arrived, this information started disappearing. In addition, Michigan stopped publishing a digital copy of the media guide, which also tends to contain this information. Once I caught wind of the publication of Overtime. I once again searched the internet for information about the majors of U of M football players.  I couldn't find it. 

However, there is some good news. This summer, I once again went on a search to find recent Michigan football media guides, and miraculously, there were all suddenly available. So, I was recently able to update my database, including the most up-to-date major information as well as the data pertaining to the 2018 team covered in Overtime. While I have no information about the GPAs of Michigan's football players, how many independent study courses that they take, or how they interact with the academic counselors, the comments made by Connelly and Coach Harbaugh about the distribution of majors on the 2018 football team can now be easily cross-checked.  The result is this:

The three quotes listed above involving the majors of players on the 2018 Michigan football team are all false.

The most obvious and concerning data point is the number of players enrolled in the General Studies program. Instead of only six players on the 2018 roster, the publicly available media guide shows this number to actually be 16. Perhaps Connelly simply misspoke, but this is pretty big mistake to make it all the way to press, and it clearly contradicts a key message of your chapter.

As for the number of different majors represented by the upperclassmen, I count only 20 unique majors for the 62 players from the 2014-2016 recruiting classes.  That includes all the non-scholarship (walk on) players.  If I include only the scholarship players, as listed in the Rivals recruiting database, the number of declared majors drops to 14, less than half of the number quoted by Connelly.

Finally, as for Coach Harbaugh's comment that the roster includes 16 to 20 engineering majors, I would be curious to know exactly how he does count them.  Because, when I look through all 123 players listed in the 2018 media guide, I only see a total of five listed as majoring in an engineering discipline, and three of those players are walk-ons.  

Overtime does mention that there are 140 total players on the team (only 85 of which are allowed to be on scholarship, per NCAA rules). So, essentially the only way for Harbaugh's quote to be accurate are for there to be a group of at least 11 "football players" who are somehow technically on the team, yet are not listed in the media guide, and who all are engineering majors.  This seems unlikely.

Considering that Connelly specifically told you, John, that his department has been tracking this data since 2010, I would personally be extremely concerned with this clear gap between what he told you and what it is clearly stated in the public record. I am also concerned that no effort was apparently made to verify that this information was correct.

A Deeper Dive Into the Numbers

As I mentioned above, I am a numbers guy, so let's now take a deeper look at the numbers. I went through the complete 2018 and 2019 football media guides for the University of Michigan and summarized the stated majors for all 123 players listed in the 2018 guide, who made up the roster that was discussed in Overtime.  For the players (especially the underclassmen) who had not declared a major in 2018, I checked the 2019 media guide to see if they had declared a major in the intervening year.  

The follow tables summarize this information in three parts: consistent starters, other scholarship players, and walk-ons.  The data is sorted by the most recent declared major information.  For reference, I included a column that lists the Rivals Recruiting Rating of each player (from 5.1 to 6.1, where higher is better) which gives a rough indication of the level of that recruit coming out of High School. Let's begin with the starters.

Table 1: List of declared majors for the consistent starters on the 2018 University of Michigan football team

As you can see, the stated number of General Studies majors on the 2018 team (six) is not only low for the entire roster, it's low for just the group of 23 consistent starters.  The actual data shows that 10 starters had a declared major of General Studies in 2018 and one additional starter (Nico Collins) also declared his major to be General Studies by the fall of 2019. Essentially, half of the starters in 2018 were General Studies majors.  

As for the rest of the scholarship players, that data are shown here.

Table 2: List of declared majors for the remaining scholarship players on the 2018 University of Michigan football team

This large grouping of players contains the bulk of the upperclassmen who have yet to declare a major.  However, the essential points are that of the 58 total players in this category, 13 of them declared their major to be General Studies by the Fall of 2019.  26 of the 58 players were still undeclared in 2019.  Of the players on the list that did declare a major, a full 40 percent are General Studies majors.

Let's now look at the walk-ons:

Table 3: List of declared majors for the walk-ons on the 2018 University of Michigan football team

Among the group of 42 walk-on football players listed in the media guide, only a single player is listed as a General Studies major, which is much more consistent with the general undergraduate population at Michigan. In fact, data from the University's Office of the Registrar shows that the number of male students enrolled in the General Studies program has averaged about 80 students per year consistently over the past decade.  

This represents roughly 0.3% of the male student body, yet the percentage of players on the football team is obviously much, much higher.  In fact, it would seem that approximately 20-25 percent of the male students enrolled in the General Studies program in 2018 and 2019 were football players.  

But, it doesn't stop there. While I did not do a full investigation of the rosters and media guides of every sport at U of M, I did spot check the bios of several members of the University of Michigan basketball team. I found that both Zavier Simpson and John Teske were also declared General Studies majors.

Finally, I went back through my football recruiting database and looked at the overall trend in declared General Studies majors back to 2007.  I filtered out the data for players that transfer or for some other reason never declared a major, and I calculated the faction of players in each recruiting class who wound up as General Studies majors.  Those data are shown here:

Figure 1: Fraction of General Studies majors in each University of Michigan recruiting class from 2007 to 2017

Note that the total number of General Studies majors in each class is listed at the top of each bar. In general, the fraction of General Studies majors among the recruited scholarship players does seem to be trending down, slightly, since 2007. It seems to fluctuate between around 30 percent and 50 percent in most years, which is certainly lower that the nearly 80 percent figure reported for the classes around 2004, as reported by the Ann Arbor news, but also obviously much higher than the general student population.

Notably, the 2016 and 2017 high school classes had the same number of General Studies majors as the 2007 and 2008 classes.  So, it is hard to make the argument that much has really changed in the past decade. These numbers still seem rather high for an academic program that the current head coach stated, "is not a degree."

Keeping Up With the Spartans

While the distribution of declared majors on the U of M roster does look strange, it is hard to evaluate this data in a vacuum. One of the major reoccurring themes of Chapter 12 is the concept of competition. Coach Harbaugh is clearly a very competitive, as are most U of M fans that I know personally.  So, it only seems fair to compare the 2018 U of M roster to another Big Ten roster.

As I am an alumnus of Michigan State University, it only seems reasonable to check the list of declared majors for the players on the 2018 MSU roster to see how they compare to their peers in Ann Arbor.  In this spirit, Table 4 summarizes the data for MSU players on the 2018 roster who started at least four games, based on the media guide.

Table 4: List of declared majors for the consistent starters on the 2018 Michigan State University football team

The list of majors shows what Steve Connelly would no doubt refer to as "a healthy spread."  I count 19 total unique majors among the group of MSU's starters (compared to only nine in Ann Arbor) with no more than four starters in the same major.  The majors that are represented by more than three players: advertising, economics, and communications rank 4th, 6th, and 15th in terms of total enrollment at MSU, based on public data from the MSU Office of the Registrar.  For reference, in 2018, General Studies was the 46th most popular major at U of M.

Moving on, Table 5 summarizes the distribution of majors for the remainder of the scholarship players on MSU's 2018 roster.

Table 5: List of declared majors for the remaining scholarship players on the 2018 Michigan State University football team

In this case, once again, a very "healthy" distribution of majors is represented.  I count 24 unique majors among the 52 student athletes in the list, and only one major, business, is represented by more than three players. Business also happens to be the most popular major at MSU.  

In fairness, though, the way MSU reports majors for underclassmen is different than it appears to be at Michigan.  MSU's incoming freshman will often state the major that they intend to select, and a year later, that major often changes.  In contrast, U of M's incoming freshmen and often sophomores are typical labeled as simply "undeclared."  So, comparing the group of non-starting scholarship players (who are often underclassmen) between the two schools is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Finally, Table 6 shows the distribution of majors for MSU's non-starting walk-ons in 2018.

Table 6: List of declared majors for the walk-ons on the 2018 Michigan State University football team

Among these 38 players, I count 20 unique majors, including several business majors. In general, the distribution of majors for the walk-ons looks very similar to the scholarship athletes. As a final visual comparison of the distribution of majors between the players at Michigan and Michigan State, Figure 2 gives the same data shown in Table 1-6 in pie chart form.

Figure 2: Comparison of the distribution of major at Michigan and Michigan State for the 2018 teams

In some cases, a picture is truly worth a thousand words.  Very clearly, the distribution of majors among MSU's football student athletes is both truly diverse and also fairly representative compared to a group of non-scholarship students at the same school (the walk-ons).  The same is clearly not true at the University of Michigan.

Academic Progress

The other main occurrence of hard numbers in Chapter 12 deals with the topic of the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate (APR) metric. I must point out, however, that some of the number printed in Chapter 12 are also not consistent with the information in the official NCAA database. For example, the University of Michigan's score in 2008-09 was not as low as 897 (it was 928) and it certainly wasn't the "beyond perfection" score of 1006 in 2013-14 (it was 989).

Overall, though, the general message is true.  Michigan certainly did improve its APR score from an average of around 940 from 2008 to 2011 (averaging a 12th place finish in the Big Ten) up to an average of 986 from 2012 to the present (averaging between a 3rd and 4th place finish in the Big Ten.) 

On its face, it does seem that under Harbaugh, or perhaps under Steve Connelly, Michigan has improved the performance of its student athletes, if we assume that the APR is actually a useful metric.  Not everyone agrees with that statement and to borrow one of your phrases, critics will suggest that "it has its strengths and weaknesses."  In 2015, an article in Forbes highlighted some of these concerns:

"These academic support activities have often morphed into more of an exercise in eligibility maintenance, academic major clustering, and flat out academic fraud just to keep an athlete on the court or the field."

In addition, the author of the Forbes article also calls for the abandonment of the APR as it is "fundamentally flawed metrics" that it is "easily manipulated by high resource institutions," which "allows the NCAA and its member institutions to essentially promote propaganda regarding student-athlete success in comparison to their peers."

The end of the article gives several concrete steps that Universities should take in order to truly improve the experiences of student athletes.  A key recommendation would be the formation of a Committee on Academic Oversight that would report annually on several key metrics, including:
  • The number of independent studies taken, by sport
  • A list of professors offering the independent studies and their average grade assigned
  • Trends in selected majors by sport
All three of these issues were certainly a problem in Ann Arbor in the past, and at the least the third bullet point still seems to be a concern.

What This All Means and Why It Matters

So, what does all this mean? For me, this entire story boils down to the conflict between perception and reality.  I think that it is fair to say that the thesis for Chapter 12 can be boiled down to one simple idea: a lot of schools cut concerns when it comes to academics, but U of M now does things "the right way." 

It all sounds great, on its face. The perception that you strive to create is that Harbaugh has turned things around and molded the current Michigan football program into an army of true "Michigan Men," who win both on the field (sometimes) and in the classroom.  The message that you are preaching gets eaten up by the massive choir of U of M fans and alumni who desperately want this story to be true. Perception, by and large, becomes reality.

But as I have shown, when one digs a bit deeper, beyond the quotes about Coach Harbaugh's competitiveness, sincerity, graciousness, and commitment to academics, a harsher reality starts to come into focus. Several experts on academic integrity cited above have highlighted concerns over the disproportionate clustering of players in a specific major and the presence of independent study programs as setting the stage for potential abuse.  Both of these things are still happening in Ann Arbor. 

Furthermore, a former U of M President, among others, have specifically commented that the General Studies program takes this potential a step farther by providing a path to make abuse even easier. In effect, it creates a "choose your own adventure" degree that likely has little value in the real world to your average student athlete (no matter how many famous alumni of the program are cited). The mere fact you allowed misinformation about the number of players still in this program to be published in order to bolster your thesis is a major, major red flag. In fact, that is virtually the textbook definition of "propaganda."

Very clearly, a path still exists at the University of Michigan to define a "degree program" that consists of the easiest possible collection of classes, including some independent studies, that will allow weaker student athletes to maintain eligibility.  I agree strongly with some of the comments from Chapter 12 that education is what you make of it. I am sure that some student athletes are thriving in the General Studies program. 

But, it is also true the water tends to naturally find the easiest path to the ocean. Students under time constraints will often pick the easiest path, if one is available. There can be no doubt that several less interested student athletes in Ann Arbor are doing the same to this day. It is simple human nature, and even "Michigan Men" are still mere mortals, contrary to popular opinion in Ann Arbor.

It even seems conceivable if not probable that the General Studies program can be used to artificially boost graduation rates and APR scores, which are then used as propaganda to further prop up both the University and its athletic program.  There is that word again. Propaganda. It has come up so many times here and throughout the history of the program in Ann Arbor that I think a more specific term is needed as it pertains to misinformation and bias in reporting on the academics or athletics at the University of Michigan.  I prefer "maize journalism."

Many people reading this letter will likely just shrug off these details as unimportant. But, if the University of Michigan is still (or ever was) the great University that you believe it to be, I would hope that facts would matter to all its alumni, including you.  I would hope that they would demand that General Studies and independent study programs be phased out as a major that was available as an option to Michigan athletes to avoid even the appearance of misconduct. 

I would hope that they would ask if the same athletic department that has lied about subjects as big as payments to the Fab Five and subjects as small as skywriting is still lying today about the majors of their athletes. I would hope that they would demand more transparency, honesty, and perhaps even some humility. The University of Michigan owes it to their student athletes, fans, and alumni.

Best Regards and Sincerely,

Paul T. Fanson
"Dr. Green and White"
Michigan State University, Class of 1998 (B.S. Chemical Engineering)
Purdue University, Class of 2002 (Ph.D. Chemical Engineering)

Comments

  1. This is not a surprising revelation. Ann Arbor symbolizes contradiction, propaganda, and double-speak. They cover-up their hypocrisy with intelligence. It's an age old trick really. The intelligent, high-achieving students masquerade for the deceit unknowingly and unfortunately knowingly without care. They do this because they desperately want to be seen in the eye of the public as winners too; this is accomplished through the success of the football teams they support. The real losers here, once again, are the poor saps who sacrifice their minds, bodies, and integrity to suit up for these schools while receiving very little in return when considering all involved. Most go off into obscurity after they play limping around with joint and cognitive impairments wondering why they did it. The skills they learned on the field translate to almost nothing in the real world of work. The fear and intimidation that they were accustomed to receive from coaches, other players, and the game itself translate to very little in the workplace outside of military service, police work, and unscrupulous business. 'WE' should all check ourselves in this debate and ask 'are we doing the right thing?'

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