The CheckerBoard

And his coach wants only assistants with hot wives....again, coaches' attitudes filter down.

I think Franklin is a sexist, misogynistic pig. And it looks like his players take after him.

Would love to see you stand in front of Robertson and spout off instead of hiding safely behind this board. He's a good student at a good school, a wrestling champion, a super football player, and many more things, sadly, that you and your board mates will never be. I used to root for the Vols and enjoy their Pride of the Southland Band. Band is still good, UThugs not so much.

Thank you for a measured, well-produced response.

It's a good thing to graduate more young men, but I just question the relevance when so much has changed in the type of athlete that Vanderbilt is now pursuing. Also, there is a serious selection bias in play here. Vanderbilt generally takes high quality students that are also athletes, so it's likely more a reflection of who they admit than what occurs at the school. If Rudy Ford could get in and do well there, he'll likely do the same elsewhere.

Regardless, I also think it's short-sighted to presume a person necessarily gets a better education at Vanderbilt versus, say, Auburn (where Ford has always wanted to play as a kid). While I think it's likely that that is the case (I'm a Vandy alum and think I received a great education there), a lot of other factors come into play. The size of the school, the size of the town, the people you want to be around, the style of football you want to play, the major you want to pursue, etc. all go into the decision of where to go to college. It's about more than just the average SAT score of the student body, and it's about more than what US News & World Report ranks you. I, for example, passed up some better academic schools to go to Vandy because I was a musician and that was the right fit for me. Wouldn't change it for the world, even though I could have earned a more prestigious degree elsewhere.

The bottom line is Vandy fans have immediately concluded he's making a mistake by choosing to hide behind the strength of the average student's degree at the school, and that, in my opinion, is just a myopic, judgmental way to view the situation.

The other thing, Labradore, is that when you think of schools in two buckets, good (VU, Stanford, etc.) and bad (UT, Auburn, etc.), you assume all athletes are capable enough academically to fit there. Not everyone belongs at places like that. Plenty of kids thrive at plenty of other places to just say that those other educations aren't valuable. It's also pretty offensive to people who have come out of those places and done really well for themselves in things other than football.

It may not be evident to those of the prevailing Vanderbilt mindset, but most people don't go to schools like that. Most people go to state institutions, and a whole heck of a lot of them do very very well, so to suggest that going to Auburn is equivalent to getting snowed and tricked into a horrible decision is ludicrous, narrow-minded, and pretty darn offensive.

I included a link for the pdf of the study that includes the stats regarding graduation rates (may not be showing up for you Denver if you're on a mobile device). The cliffs notes version would be (and this is obviously overly simplified): a black male would have to be border line crazy to go to any SEC school other than Vanderbilt. Harsh statement, but there's no sugar coating that the other SEC programs' graduation rates for black men should be a source of great embarrassment.

Denver, I've read many of your posts over time and I have to ask... objectively, you really aren't impressed with what Franklin has done? It's easy for me to say that Freeze is doing a great job at Ole Miss. Butch is off to a nice start in Knoxville. Just surprised anyone wouldn't be impressed (amazed?) at Franklin "making the impossible possible."

Just out of curiosity, it doesn't sound like your time at VU made you a Vanderbilt fan. Why? I've always found them to be the ultimate underdog story. Cheering against them is like cheering against a kid with cancer. Or hating a real life Rudy Ruettiger. Even if you're a Vol fan, as a Vanderbilt alum, no room for VU as your second favorite team?

Either way, I enjoy the good conversation.

Oh this is an interesting tidbit from the study. Ninety percent of the student population graduates from Vanderbilt yet black males are at 74 percent. With such a huge graduation rate why is there that big of a gap?

Looking at UT, our graduation rate is 60 percent with 48 percent black males graduating.

Attrition is to be expected at a state school - it's an experience where young people come to find whether its right for them or not. I'd like to know how's my student athletes UT and these other SEC schools have compared to Vanderbilt. It speaks in percentages but that can mean anything.

I just did some quick research and this is what I found. Vanderbilt has 12,000 students. The study states 3.2 percent of the student body is black males. UT has 30,000 students. Out of that, 3.4 percent are black males.

Simple math will tell you that UT has more than twice as many black male students than Vamdy. More people? More likely you're going to see attrition.

What's elitist about telling a young man where he can get a degree? Perhaps I should talk to my black male and female friends and ask them why they went to UT or UTC since apparently the only school they can graduate from in the south is Vanderbilt.

Yes that is completely disrespectful. And I'm not even talking about sports now. I'd like to see research on black women. I'd like to see research on black students as a whole. That is a primary example of eggheaded academia at its finest. You find a little segment to do your research paper on to get your PhD and then someone picks it up and runs with it without looking at realistic scenarios.
You are devaluing a person's degree at other institutions by saying, "come here, you can get your degree." And when your looking at a student population half the size of another then your also giving an impression of false hope because not everyone can get into that university. And it's better to give a kid a chance then none at all.

I can definitely see and respect that perspective. Objectively, if I were a parent and my son had to choose between a school like Stanford, Vandy, and NW or a school like UT, Auburn, and Kentucky, at first I'd be crazy not to say the academically superior school. However, maybe he isn't geared to that kind of environment, or another school has a better business program or basket weaving program, or whatever. That doesn't make it a wrong or bad choice. If anyone could graduate from Harvard, it wouldn't be Harvard... Likewise with Vandy.