Nationwide, football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than their classmates ? and men?s basketball players average seven points less than football players.
Those figures come from an Atlanta Journal-Constitution study of 54 public universities, including the members of the six major Bowl Championship Series conferences and other schools whose teams finished the 2007-08 season ranked among the football or men?s basketball top 25.
While it?s commonly known that admission standards are different for athletes, the AJC study quantifies how wide the gap is between athletes and the general student body at major universities.
Georgia Tech?s football players had the nation?s best average SAT score, 1028 of a possible 1600, and best average high school GPA, 3.39 of a possible 4.0 in the core curriculum. But Tech?s football players still scored 315 SAT points lower on average than their classmates.
At the University of Georgia, the average football SAT was 949, which is 239 points behind the average for an undergraduate student at Georgia ? and 79 points behind Tech?s football average. The Bulldogs? average high school GPA was 2.77, or 45th out of 53 teams for which football GPAs were available. Their SAT average ranked them 22nd.
Nationwide, coaches who would never offer a scholarship to a player who was 6 inches shorter or half a second slower than other prospects routinely recruit players whose standardized test scores suggest they?re at a competitive disadvantage in the classroom.
It?s the price of winning.
?If you?re going to mount a competitive program in Division I-A, and our institution is committed to do that, some flexibility in admissions of athletes is going to take place,? said Tom Lifka, chairman of the committee that handles athlete admissions at the University of California, Los Angeles. ?Every institution I know in the country operates in the same way. It may or may not be a good thing, but that?s the way it is.?
UCLA, which has won more NCAA championships in all sports than any other school, had the biggest gap between the average SAT scores of athletes in all sports and its overall student body, at 247 points. ?
