Myth: Playing football at a big-deal college gets you into the NFL | Hacker News Reader

Myth: Playing football at a big-deal college gets you into the NFL

sports.espn.go.com

9 pointsakkartik9 comments

I should first state a bias that I really dislike Greg Easterbrook as a writer for ESPN. That being said:

This article is terrible.

His main thesis is that you don't have to lower academic standards in order to be successful at football. Since the poster didn't even use this as the title, I wonder whether this is even worth discussing, but I'll quickly summarize. In the same way that you don't HAVE to have 300+ pound players to be successful at football, you don't have to lower academic standards to be successful, but you're limiting your talent pool, and it will make success harder. This is like saying that you don't HAVE to have a bug tracking system at your startup in order to be successful, but you sure are limiting yourself if you don't.

Then there is his thesis that's the title of the post, which is that it's a myth that playing football at a big-deal college gets you into the nfl. This is trivially true, and I don't think worth noting. This would be like saying "Myth: going to college at an ivy league school makes you a millionare". Sure, that's true, but your likelihood goes WAY up if you attend one of the top tier schools. In the article he fails to connect the dots when he reports on USC and Miami that a player is ~6 times more likely to go to the NFL compared to attending an average division 1 school.

To some posters comments, I disagree that a D1 football player who is on scholarship is just as prepared for life as a diligent student. First, having good grades from a college will open more doors for you later in life, whether it be grad school, getting interviews, etc. Whether this is right or fair can be argued, but it is the state of affairs. Secondly, in many cases football players are forced to light load courses while they play and take at least 5 years to graduate, and often once their eligibility runs out after 4 years, their grades that were good enough for them to stay enrolled while they played football suddenly aren't good enough to keep them enrolled as a non-athlete student. This happens all the time, and why for academic awards the graduation rate of the team (or athletic program as a whole) is often inspected. But I do agree if you compare an athlete against an average to below average student who drank and borrowed their way through school, the athlete may be better off. They may have some semblance of work ethic, and at least they're not in debt.

This article promotes the myth that getting good grades in college is what prepares you for life, and if you don't go to a good college and get good grades then you can't be successful.

Exactly what I came in to say. It is exactly this kind of thinking that gets so many young people in to trouble. In fact, the football players that don't make the NFL probably got a great deal.

Every year there are a large number of students that go deeply into debt with the belief that they will come out groomed for a financially rewarding future.

Contrast this with D1 football players who are typically on scholarship. The football player may be just as unprepared as the diligent student, but they probably have much less college debt.

>The football player may be just as unprepared as the diligent student, but they probably have much less college debt.

You mean the players that didn't go to class, barely got by with a degree that's worth less than the paper its printed on? Interesting theory.

You're making quite a large assumption that every single player skips out on the education. This is not my experience. I graduated from a D1 school and several of the football players received engineering degrees, just like me. I don't think any of them made it to the NFL, but I can tell you one thing, they did go to college for free.

Oh come now. While there are certainly exceptions, in most cases going to college, learning how to learn, developing a strong work-ethic, does indeed prepare you to be successful in life.

I know we like to go on about how you don't need a 4-year degree to be a successful in software development. But this doesn't extend to most fields.

I upvoted parent and grandparent.

Alex3917's 'myth' is a strawman: of course it's possible to do well without an education. You shouldn't roll over and give up just because you didn't get to go to 4-year college. But an education is a resource, and you want to use all the resources you can get at.

I agree that universities are often prohibitively expensive, and not always the best decision anymore. Many programs at many universities flunk a cost-benefit analysis.

I would like to make 3 small points:

Most importantly: Athletes that have intentions of going pro in a major sport make up a tiny percentage of student athletes. The majority of student athletes care a great deal about school and graduate with a free education to boot. Universities like well rounded classes- not well rounded students. Student athletes are a component of this.

College football programs are open about the fact that they don't turn players into NFL prospects. This is why they honestly call them recruits. Unlike, say, an Ivy League school that claims (falsely) to turn you into a successful individual when in fact they only recruit the top talent. You go to a USC because they recognize you might already be NFL material and you give the school a good chance to win.

Thirdly, unlike what the author suggests, it is possible to care about both football and academics. They are not mutually exclusive.

I think this is a great article for college football players to reflect on, but it ignores the fact that it's nearly impossible to get into the NFL without playing college football. Of course the cut is tough, but you'll never make it big in anything if you don't believe you can beat the odds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com