General Sports Water Cooler

I think the Duke "three year graduation plan" is also suspect. They achieve this by taking a credit load in the summer. I recall several Duke players were playing in Europe during the time these players were enrolled in the summer program. Yet they got full credit. I am sure gimmes for these athletes were handed out.

But then again Coach K and Duke are above reproach.

The football players at Duke have similar problems to athletes at many of the better academicschools. The basketball players, despite being significantly less academically qualified, have never had a problem and graduate in less time despite playing a much more travel intensive sport? Definitely nothing going on there.

When I played we had an art appreciation course geared for basketball players every fall. Take home tests and a non supervised day trip to NYC ' to see the Met' after basketball season was over. No one really saw the Met and everyone got an A. We also had a Trig prof who loved basketball and if you were on the team you got an 'A'. His tests were open book.

Every school has these classes out there and the athletes know how to find them or they will find the athlete. usually not this blatant though.

This part happens at every school and it's totally different then doing it from the administrative sde.

That was my point that every school does it even at the level I played (DII) and it is never this blatant...I don't think the the admin side didn't know about some of the classes available and looked the other way.

I ended up in two classes at Clemson my senior year that were compromised almost fully of athletes. One was an elective and the other was a required public speaking class, but it was like Speech 150 (the joke version) instead of the real Speech 250 that pretty much everyone else took. It was basically a who's who of the 2004 Clemson football team with Charlie Whitehurst, Leroy Hill, etc, etc.

Basically, they take real classes, but most of them get into the easiest versions with the best professors that are typically full before regular students even get to register. This is why i never saw any of them until Spring semester of my senior year when i finally had priority with registration.

Sure, i had real finance and accounting classes with a few athletes, but it's definitely the minority that end up in "real" majors like that, and definitely very few football or hoops players. One of my friends majoring in marketing had classes with football and basketball players all of the time.

But is it ALL out there? It seems not.

There have been several Duke basketball players suspended for academic reasons over the years. Off the top of my head, Cook, Newton, Lang, Sanders, and Price, iirc.

I can tell you weren't an engineering major; open book exams were always brutal compared to regular exams.

Jason Williams? Sociology degree I think...

Wasn't the three degree not about graduating but spreading out a lighter course load and dates back to Laettner and Hurley?

Newton was suspended for 2 Terms, Summer 1 & Summer 2 ....

Newton was suspended mid-season and held out of the Carolina game and ACC Tournament. If they hadn't missed the NCAA tourney for the first time in forever, he would have been held out of that. Surely someone tweaking the system would have figured out how to drag out appeals until after the season but still in the Spring Semester, no?