SI on Oklahoma State academics
Not exactly a killshot aimed at Les Miles, but it does not make him sound very favorable.
As Miles said, "Academics first," he would hold up two fingers. And as he said, "Football second," he would hold up one.
But, here is the money quote. Money qat?
"There was a couple that I would be like, Damn, I don't know how you made it through high school," says Allen. Coxeff recalls a 2003 team meeting in which Miles asked one of the Cowboys to write house on a chalkboard. "He spelled it H-A-S," says Coxeff. "I was like, Oh, my God, how is he even in this room? ... How can someone who can't spell come to a major college?"
September 11th, 2013 at 12:16 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 2:04 PM ^
*ain't
September 11th, 2013 at 12:17 PM ^
As Miles said, "Academics first," he would hold up two fingers. And as he said, "Football second," he would hold up one.
Where have I heard this before? Was there something like this in Three and Out? I feel like I've heard this story before, and possibly not having to do with Miles.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:33 PM ^
This is a fairly common thing among football coaches, not sure its even worth putting in the article. Also, didn't we have a guy from Ball State posting here saying the same thing about Hoke?
September 11th, 2013 at 12:56 PM ^
The difference being, when Hoke held up two fingers, it meant twice that they should put TWICE the effort into academics. Clearly.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:37 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 12:38 PM ^
Reading retention FTW.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:46 PM ^
Wow, imaginary plus-1 to you guys. Good memories.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:51 PM ^
That's a dumb old joke that a lot of football coaches do. It's not necessarily revealing about Miles.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:51 PM ^
That's a dumb old joke that a lot of football coaches do. It's not necessarily revealing about Miles.
September 11th, 2013 at 3:00 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 12:20 PM ^
Having had the "pleasure" of watching Brandon Weeden's razor sharp decision-making skills up close and personal for the past two years I can honestly say that he probably was the guy asked to spell house.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:44 PM ^
Weeden didn't need T. Boone Pickens money, he already had a nice $565,000 signing bonus from the Yankees. Plus his five seasons playing minor league baseball.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:50 PM ^
I wasnt accusing him of taking money (although the suit picture was funny) - I was claiming that Weeden could possibly be dumber than a sack of hammers.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:56 PM ^
Now that I can get behind, he probably knew by age 16 he was turning pro in one sport or another (most likely baseball where no college would be needed) and simply was your protypical "dumb jock"
September 11th, 2013 at 2:11 PM ^
You may be overselling hammers, or at least users of them...
September 11th, 2013 at 12:23 PM ^
My biggest takeaway - the Oklahoma State fans in the comments section make MSU or OSU fans look downright reflective about their misgivings. One of those fake classes at Oklahoma State must have been logic.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:37 PM ^
Holy shit you are right. I got about 15 comments deep and thought to myself that the crew over at Penn State probably thinks this fan base is delusional.
BTW....LOVE your new avatar. That's fantastic.
September 11th, 2013 at 1:07 PM ^
I dunno, I have no emotional attachment to Ok State one way or another, but I read the SI articles and thought that this huge "story" has a lot of vaguery and relies heavily on former players with questionable credibility. The academics bit was particularly vague and "whatever," IMO. Probably not hard to find a former athlete to feed SI a quote along the lines of "I did nothing in college." Hell, I could find you a dozen non-athletes who would say the same thing about their college experience. Not hard for an unmotivated regular student to rob themselves of a proper college education by collecting credits in "Bowling" and "Mixology."
September 11th, 2013 at 12:33 PM ^
"Academics first," he would hold up two fingers. And as he said, "Football second," he would hold up one...I have read on here before that hoke did that at ball st.
September 11th, 2013 at 2:59 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 12:40 PM ^
"I don't know if I didn't learn anything in college because it is college, and you don't learn what you need to know for the real world, or because [at Oklahoma State] it was a big joke," says Woods
It's the latter.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:41 PM ^
My niece got a free ride engineering scholly to Okie St. I wonder if this will have any consequences on her getting a job post graduation. I do know she can spell "house"
September 11th, 2013 at 12:48 PM ^
Frankly, and perhaps this says a lot about me, I don't find the football first ideology to be anything more than an accurate reflection of the state of college football. Brady Hole isn't getting paid to make sure Shane Morris gets an A in his intro to statistics class, and Shane Morris isn't really here to take that intro to statistics class. These revelations pale in comparisons to yesterday's... SI should've just dumped them all at once
September 11th, 2013 at 12:51 PM ^
Is Brady Hole the new incarnation of Dick Rod?
September 11th, 2013 at 1:00 PM ^
Beat me to it.
September 11th, 2013 at 12:57 PM ^
I know it is a typo, but it is not immortalized forever in a thread about academics and misspelling words
September 11th, 2013 at 1:03 PM ^
Yes it is.
September 11th, 2013 at 1:16 PM ^
I really, really, really hope iOS7 fixes autocorrect. Really.
September 11th, 2013 at 1:08 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 1:12 PM ^
"Further aiding the program's efforts to keep players eligible was a host of instructors who gave passing grades for little or no work, players say. There were enough of them that a player could schedule a semester's worth of classes that required him to do next to nothing. "Y"ou just show up, you'll get a C," says Cruz.
I wish I had classes like that in my history. The most irresponsible thing - if this is true - is that they apparently basically said outright that they would get the "C" because they (the instructors involved, presumably) "care about Oklahoma State football". The part where someone asked a player what they thought they deserved in a class was pretty amazing really - the player said "an F", and they were willing to give him a B.
September 11th, 2013 at 1:23 PM ^
if he did it at Ball State I totally understand. :)
September 11th, 2013 at 5:58 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 1:45 PM ^
Kind of surprised Treadwell didn't pick Oklahoma State now.
September 11th, 2013 at 7:57 PM ^
And there has been a lot of smoke around the sudden recruiting prowess of Ole Miss...
September 11th, 2013 at 2:05 PM ^
While I find these stories interesting because it is cool to get an inside look at what was happening the past decade at OSU, I kinda feel bad for the OSU fans. Cash, girls, drugs, and academic fraud all sound bad and make for a good story, but all that stuff is common in bigtime college football. When I read part 1 yesterday, it felt like one of those scenarios where OSU isn't supposed to be good because they are not a traditional power, and some pissed-off OU or Texas fan tried to bring them down. Then today I find out that one of the main reporters for the piece is a huge OU fan who went around to disgruntled ex-players who had an ax to grind with the school digging up dirt.
I am too young to remember the SMU scandal, but this reminds me of that story. A non-traditional power that became too good too quickly and started ruffling the feathers of the big boys. Obviously like SMU, OSU is in the wrong here, but it kinda sucks for their fans that they are the ones being punished while other schools have gotten away with similar practices for much longer than 10 years.
In the end I don't really care what happens to OSU, but it seems weird that they are the ones being dragged through the mud this week when there are probably bigger fish to fry in terms of football scandals.
I also can't help but think there is an Ole Miss version of this story coming out in a few years after they start beating some of the SEC powers.
September 11th, 2013 at 2:22 PM ^
I kept hoping this would be a bigger story than it is, because if anyone is surprised that college football players and teams are run counter to the ethos of a university then they should turn their ham radio back on and close the door to their hut in the middle of the forest.
What surprises me is how few "real" sources this article has; it's more disgruntled former players and anonymous sources. While I'm fairly certain this level of rule breaking wouldn't happen at a school like UM simply because the University retains a strong position compared to the athletic department and has some checks in place, I'm sure there are kids who get benefits here that are in violation of the NCAA rules. They'd be silly not to, given how toothless the NCAA has been in enforcing any of these rules.
What I am looking forward to, though, is the aftermath section. It does seem like the real "victims", if you will, are those players who attend school and get passed through in order to play football, yet graduate with broken bodies, no education, and little future. You hear these stories of kids wanting to escape poverty and oppressive conditions and they see sports as a way out, yet once their eligibility expires many of them fall back into the towns and situations like nothing changed, and that is depressing to me. I'm not saying that everyone who plays a collegiate sport on scholarship has to become a model businessman or woman, but you'd hope that those most at risk of falling through the cracks would be forced to learn something, anything, while playing their sport so that they can become a productive member of society when they leave.
September 11th, 2013 at 3:23 PM ^
What would count as a "real source"? Short of someone wearing a wire and recording a conversation like happened at Auburn and Baylor basketball, every possible source can be discredited as a "disgruntled fomer player" or a drug dealer or a mentally-disturbed former graduate assistant or a former hostess that won't admit that she really WANTED to be coerced into sex with football players. And besides, no matter what allegations are leveled there's always the respoinse that everybody does it anyway so why are you picking on us? even when the allegations clearly go far beyond what everybody does.
September 11th, 2013 at 9:13 PM ^
I'm not saying that the sources are fabricated or should be without bias; I doubt people who are happy with any program would speak out against them. What gets me about this report is that it probably happens at most schools, and I guess I'm just so worn down by this "exposes" that don't lead to anything that I'm burned out and can't muster any emotion for it. I mean, Miami has oodles of evidence of impropriety from people who admit as much, and virtually nothing happened.
We all heard the stories about Woodson when he was being recruited, and while I doubt boosters are in the lockerroom handing out bags of money at UM, I'm sure you could find disgruntled former players to complain about practices at UM with dubious credibility (example #1 being PracticeGate). I'm interested to see what happens to these athletes when they leave school because I think that is profoundly sad and needs to be addressed, but showing schools keep academically-unprepared students eligible by putting them in easy classes is something I think most people aren't remotely shocked by.
September 11th, 2013 at 2:35 PM ^
i know we all hate doug gottlieb anyway, but you should have HEARD him talking about this yesterday on cbssports radio. he went to oklahoma state. and he was pulling every little "this guy has no credibility", "where is the hard proof?", etc.
it was embarrassing.
someone shouldn't allow him, who is a huuuge homer as it is, but also holds grudges and is biased beyond belief, to be speaking on this whole osu (ytosu) scandal. it was seriously starting to piss me off, he...well fuck him.
September 11th, 2013 at 2:42 PM ^
a guy who steals credit cards from his college roommate and gets expelled from a school is the person i want to go to for discussions on college athletes and morality.
September 11th, 2013 at 2:58 PM ^
September 11th, 2013 at 4:20 PM ^
Literally was about to post something about him. Fortunetly for him he taught himself how to read in his thirties and is actually doing pretty well for himself now. Still it's really sad that he could get passed through the education system being illiterate.
September 11th, 2013 at 9:10 PM ^
Manley's OSU coach, Pat Jones, is a regular contributor on one of the Oklahoma sports radio stations. He mentioned Dexter Manley, saying while laughing, that if Manley were around today with online classes, it would be easy to get him a Master's degree and Ph.D. He also mentioned a Nebraska player named to the Big 8 All Academic Team (I don't recall the name) and the Nebraska players joked about the award because they knew the lodds of the player legitimately earning the grades was virtually zero.
September 11th, 2013 at 4:22 PM ^
Michael Rosenberg writes for SI. That fact speaks for itself. In fact, he started writing for SI around the time that his "expose" of RR was published, and Brian Cook wrote that it was possibly all part of some coming out party for Rosenberg. SI is also probably jealous that Yahoo Sports broke some major scandals such at Miami and Oregon (did they also break Penn State?) and wants in. That the writer of the OSU article supposedly is a major OU fan is messed up.