Neuheisel’s Press Conference and UCLA’s admissions
In between bowl games on New Year’s Eve about a dozen of us took the time to watch a replay of Rick Neuheisel’s news conference today, and we see that Rick has lost none of his confidence. We are not going to chastise Neuheisel for taking advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime, but Rick back behind a podium being introduced as the head football coach at a major university somehow brought to mind what has often been said about Bill Clinton. No doubt, Clinton wanted to be President from a very early age (see 1963 pic of Clinton/JFK meeting in the White House Rose Garden), but after achieving the great goal of his life he squandered away so much of what he could have accomplished by his own personal behavior. Neuheisel up to this point of his life is in exactly the same position, and he is very lucky that he did not begin his head coaching career at UCLA, or he would have no where to turn right now, and that is why Rick knows how very fortunate he is to have gotten another opportunity to be a head coach.
Let’s assume that Neuheisel is not going to break any recruiting rules, because if he does, even secondary violations in the next few years then he is a mighty stupid individual. The NCAA rules are very clear, and Neuheisel knew very well what he was doing at Colorado and Washington, and if he wants to write that off as youthful indiscretion, because he committed these violations when he was in his 30s, then that will get a good laugh from us. If someone will actually buy that song and dance when we have young men and women fighting and dying in Iraq that are not even 20 yet, and platoon and company leaders not 25, then there are some mighty naive people in this world. Of course he knew better, but when you are talking about a Clinton or Neuheisel, who both can spin tales and distract people from the real issues with the best of them, then you are talking about master’s of a very precious craft. Some people utilize that gift of persuasion to move nations and to shape world history, FDR, Churchill, Gandhi, Kennedy, and Reagan come to mind, and some squander that special gift away. Neuheisel has been given a 3rd chance, and it will be up to him and him alone to not only prove to all the naysayers out here that he actually does want to be known as someone other than “Slick Rick,” but he must also prove it to the man in the mirror.
Rick was right about one thing, UCLA is a very special place, and a great university. People that have not had the opportunity to spend time in Los Angeles, and especially the westside of LA which basically runs from Hollywood to Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean, cannot understand the role that UCLA has played in helping one of the most vibrant and creative swaths of our country come to life. UCLA sits at the heart of entertainment and business in LA, and right in the middle of that is the UCLA athletic department, which was brought to life by John Wooden with his great Bruin basketball teams of the 60s and 70s. A lot of people don’t know that Dick Enberg of NBC and CBS Sports fame was the play-by-play man for those John Wooden teams, and during those days the entire town of Los Angeles hung on every move made in Westwood. The UCLA football team was just OK during the Wooden years, that is until Terry Donahue showed up in 1976, and in the early 1980s he took the Bruins on a run of seven years, 1982-1988, that most UCLA fans would gladly take today. Neuheisel played for Donahue in the early 80s, so he knows what a winning UCLA football program looks like, but the real question is can Rick overcome his personal foibles and traits to return UCLA football to a respectful level. Donahue did not work under the sort of cloud that Neuheisel begins with, and in fact Donahue took over at UCLA after working as an assistant to both Pepper Rogers and Dick Vermeil, which gave him a level of training and competence that Neuheisel no doubt would have wanted if he could do his career over.
We have no idea if Neuheisel will be able to summon the will and personal responsibility to redeem his career at UCLA, but if he is not able to he will be one of the most foolish men to ever walk this planet. It is not often that humans get a 3rd chance to prove themselves, especially at a place that knows all about one’s past transgressions. In fact, the people that hired Neuheisel no longer have anywhere to stand when it comes to hiring and firing athletic coaches at UCLA for NCAA violations, because they just hired a man that himself admits the mistakes he made in his past in that area. If Rick can use the excuse that he was young and foolish (the men that won World War II were much younger), every other coach at UCLA can, and that might just put UCLA in a very uncomfortable situation down the road if they try to hold someone to what will be a clear double-standard. Whatever the outcome of this chance that UCLA took, and it is a huge chance that the school took by laying on the line the integrity of the school when there were over 100 qualified candidates out there besides Neuheisel, it will be very interesting to see how this all works out. Today here at Coaches Hot Seat discussed where we would place Neuheisel on our Coaches Hot Seat Rankings, and after much discussion, and a few people that wanted to put him in the No. 1 Hot Seat, we placed Rick at # 35 which is in the Edge of Hot Seat category. With the schedule that UCLA has in front of them in 2008, we think it will be very hard for Rick to put up much better than 6 or 7 wins, and if that happens it will certainly create a lot of interesting conversation in LA. If UCLA implodes in ‘08 and wins 5 or less games, there will be some serious discussions of why in the world Dorrell was fired, to be replaced with a guy like Neuheisel. We certainly wish Rick Good Luck, and we mean that, because UCLA deserves a good football program and if they think Rick is the guy to do that, then let’s see what he can do.
Speaking of UCLA deserving a good football program, Rick was asked today in the press conference about admissions at UCLA and whether he was going to try and impact the admission of football players. Rick massaged his answer, but we are not going to be shy about what we think on this issue. We just checked and there are over 25,000 undergraduates at UCLA and no doubt the competition is keen to get into school there, but we find it outrageous that the admissions department at UCLA would make a big deal out of a few football players getting into school, if they have met all of the obligations that are now set forth by the NCAA via their academic clearinghouse. Take a look at the requirements at the NCAA Academic website, and one will see that it is not easy for many kids, especially for kids that are living in places that don’t have the best schools or don’t have the most ideal home lives to meets these requirements, and we think that if kid that is playing high school football and is making his grades and meet these NCAA requirements he certainly should be given every opportunity to attend a publicly funded school like UCLA. We are only talking about 25 or so kids a year, and only 25 a year if all of them were marginal students, which we know is not the case. This is not just about winning football games, but giving an opportunity to kids to attend a school like UCLA, that in the recent past have been turned away because they did not have an ideal college application. That is crapola at it’s worst, and no one can tell us that a kid from a well-to-do suburb that is going to a great high school and has the time to spend hours studying should be treated equally as a kid from an inner-city that is not only working his ass off to get through school, but is working hard to just survive everyday. If these kids do meet the NCAA’s academic requirements and they are good citizens and have shown they are serious about their studies, and the UCLA football staff think they can not only help out the football team, but become a productive member of the school, the decision on whether they should be admitted is a no-brainer. They should be admitted, and if UCLA continues to discriminate against these kids, many of them from incredibly disadvantaged backgrounds, then we are going to learn a lot about the people that are running UCLA and that goes all the way up to Chancellor Block. We are only talking about a few dozen kids out of the 100 or so that are on football scholarship at any given time, and if someone at UCLA actually believes that admitting a few dozen marginal students that happen to be football players is going to compromise UCLA then shame on them. If some of these marginal students get to UCLA and drop-out, so what? Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, and he turned out okay, and there are millions of Americans in our society that only went to college for a year or two, that are doing great things and draw on their college experiences everyday. The bottom-line on admissions at UCLA is that they should wake-up and join the rest of us in the real world. Building a college student body around a bunch of people that keep their noses stuck in books all the time is the surest way to create a place full of nerds. We agree completely with Vince Lombardi, “A school without a football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall,” and right now for all intents and purposes UCLA does not have a football program. Neuheisel can have a big hand in changing that, but Chancellor Block can play an ever bigger role by bringing some sanity to the UCLA admissions department. If the bureaucrats in the UCLA admissions department won’t admit student-athletes that the NCAA says are qualified to do college-level work, then Chancellor Block should find some people to work in admissions that don’t have a bias against the football program.
Good Luck to Rick Neuheisel and UCLA in 2008.
Remember that student athletes admitted at top public universities have to be able to compete in the classes there. It does no good to admit someone that only meets the NCAA requirements if they’re not going to be able to pass their classes. This is a particular problem at my institution, Georgia Tech, where we have many fans clamoring for lower academic standards, but we already have problems with our football players being able to handle our easiest major, management, which still requires two semesters of math including calculus. Also, the NCAA may say that someone is qualified based on the clearinghouse standards, but when your 10-year review comes up, if your student athlete academic profile deviates significantly from the student body at large (for GT, student athlete average SAT is about 1100, while for freshmen overall it’s over 1300), you wind up answering a lot of questions from the NCAA.
I’ll agree with Mitch. It does no service to the students or to the university to admit kids who are going to struggle and fail out. I’ve worked in admissions for a major university with a major sports program, and there’s no one who want the university to succeed in sports more than the admission officers. My colleagues and I attended countless sports games and remember the names and backgrounds of every athlete we admitted. We all cared very deeply about our university, our sports programs and the students whose applications we read.
When you have a kid who fails out because he/she’s not prepared for the academic rigor of your university, you as an admission officer have failed that student and your school. You’re not doing the kid a favor when you throw a woefully underprepared student into a too-rigorous academic environment. In most cases, that student could have succeeded at a place with less rigorous academics. That’s not a Bill Gates situation. That’s a lifetime aversion to learning that you’ve inculcated by throwing the kid in the deep end when you know he can’t make it. That’s setting a kid up to fail. To use these kids as athletes for the aggrandizement of a football program while knowing that they won’t hack it in the classroom…well that’s just sick.
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