A Funny thing happened at Oversigning.com

I as wrote in a previous blog entry I really like oversigning.com.  He does some really good work on a topic I think is important and I have posted from time to time.  His last article has the following quote:

As far as we know, academic scholarship recipients are not bumped off of their scholarships simply because the school wants to bring someone else in with a better GPA or a better SAT score.  Academic scholarship recipients are given baseline performance metrics by which they are required to perform and if they do they stay on scholarship, and furthermore, the people making the decisions as to whether or not someone stays on academic scholarship HAS NO VESTED INTEREST in whether or not that person remains on scholarship.  The problem with athletic scholarships is that they do not have clearly defined baseline metrics for the players to adhere to in order to keep their scholarship - everything is at the discretion of the coach, who has A HUGE VESTED INTEREST in who gets a scholarship and who doesn't, and many times coaches make decisions based on recruiting and who they think they can get to come in or who they have lined up to come in already.

Sound familiar?  Take a look at my blog post  The one year scholarship.  This is based on a posting I made on his forums and I want to highlight this part:

A university's main purpose is to educate not to play football.   The two people in my example are performing better than the average student but only one was given a scholarship to excel in academics.  The other student is on a football scholarship and it is almost impossible to come up with a consistently fair way to judge football skill like a GPA does for academic performance.  That means to keep an athletic scholarship you need to keep the coach happy and that is akin to being a job and not a student.

I realize that these students spend a lot more time in the weight room than in the classroom and that college football lost its status as a pure amateur endeavor a long time ago.  However, "cutting" players because they aren't playing as well as originally expected is another step towards professionalism that I'd prefer college football not take.  I'd prefer to hold on as long as possible to the ideal that these are educational institutions that happen to have a football team and not the other way around.

He didn't plagiarize me but it is pretty obvious he took my thoughts and put them in a slightly different format.  I don't mind at all and in fact I'm a bit flattered.  He did make a slightly stronger argument by adding the fact that an educator has no vested interest in whether a student is a successful  while a coach has a huge vested interest if a player can produce on the field.

Just thought it was funny and worth a blog post.