It's Official: Christian Scott and Brandon Collins done for the year

“But they’re also not getting much help from the football academic support staff.”

I guess that’s a fair inference, given what’s happened, but is your conclusion more than inferential?

Inference is all that’s required. The guys are in good academic standing with the University, they just weren’t taking the right classes, right? Making sure that doesn’t happen is basically the academic support staff’s job, or it certainly should be.

I mean, at first we could only infer that Madoff investors didn’t get much help from the SEC. we didn’t know for sure that the SEC wasn’t telling people to get out and hadn’t done their job. Now we know for sure after their report, but it was blatantly obvious even before that. Odds on an official report from the football staff citing support staff failure?

I don’t know that it’s fair to say they’re not getting “much” help from the staff, but it’s certainly fair to say the academic staff has not demonstrated the ability to consistently connect with, and manage the academic affairs of, the team.

It’s absurd that the coaches were caught off guard on this one, and it’s time for a change near the top of the academic staff.

Why isn’t half the LSU football team or OU for that matter on academic suspension all the time?

I know you guys are stocked with talent, but these are semi-significant losses, no?

Always thought Scott was a playmaker at safety and felt like Collins was a guy Colt really trusted.

“Odds on an official report from the football staff citing support staff failure?”

The title of a certain Brett Easton Ellis novel comes to mind …

Hipho, absolutely significant. Overall we’ve been fortunate in terms of personnel losses this season, but those two hurt.

This is a little more complicated than a mere flunk-out, which is what PJ Tucker accomplished. We’ll never know if classes were flunked or dropped, but I think all UT requires is that hours be passed. My suspicion is that the actual meat of the degree path were the classes blown.

I’m not absolving the staff, but I still think the heavier load here belongs on the players.

A poster on Orangebloods has a good summary of what happened in Scott’s case.

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Re: Confirmed: Scott/Collins to miss the rest of the season Reply

Thanks Adobewalls, you are the man.

As I mentioned, UT does need an administrator to tell student athletes exactly what they need to do each semester in order to keep their eligible.
It’s not as simple as just passing a given course/class.

I’m not removing the resposibility of the student athlete to attend to his/her studies.
But I am saying a student athlete needs some guidance as to what courses to take to fill the requirements and what numbers he/she needs in each class and as a overall GPA to remain eligible.

The UT Coaching Staff [all sports] should NOT be burden with these responsibilities, but should be informed by the administor if a student athlete is becoming borderline.

I don’t think we should forget the UT Football Program makes The University about a $145 million per year according to SI. That is certainly worth the expense and effort of an administor and a small staff specifically dealing with academic issues.

This is exactly where the ball was dropped in Scott’s case. In the Fall semester (LAST fall), he had a problem in a class with a couple of late assignments in which he was doing well. It was thought that it was fixed, but was not.

The athletic department has a staff of people to keep up with things like this. The football team has people specifically assigned to them to handle only football players. The only athletic team that has their own dedicated staff. If they had been doing their job, they would have seen that there was a problem. In the worst case scenario, Scott could have taken an extra class in summer school or in the Spring and all would have been cool.

The kids are aware (and accept the fact) that ultimately, they are the only ones responsible for their own welfare. They are well aware that they screwed up and are accepting the punishment.

Having said that, many of these kids are not used to the rigorous academics at UT and add on the fact that they are devoting a ton of time to athletics. The athletic department, in their infinite wisdom, has hired Academic counselors to make sure that not only are they keeping up with their school work, but meeting the NCAA standards. Some Academic counselor sat there with his thumb up his a$$ for almost 9 months and let this situation sit until it was too late to do anything about it. Once it was finally discovered, the only hope for reinstatement was if the prof would go back and accept the late papers and change the grade. Asking the professor has been a problem because the professor is on a sabbatical and has been out of the country.

Academic issues with the University is not the reason Chris is not playing. He is not playing because he didn’t have enough hours to meet the NCAA standards towards academic progress. Even if he couldn’t have gotten the grade in that class straightened out, he could have taken the class in the spring semester or summer school if he had just known that he was about to fall behind the NCAA requirements.

That was not his fault and it is a shame that he is paying the price for some person on the academic counselor’s staff who didn’t do his job.

What I don’t like about that post is the last paragraph.

It’s not like degree plans are a departmental secret. Even if there were not an athletic department support staff, at any time Scott could have walked into the office of the dean of the school he’s in and get directed to someone who could give him the plan for his major.

Not only that, did he ever look at his grades? At some point, he must have learned that he flunked this class. It should have been after last fall, at which point he should have contacted both the athletic department and the school to find out what he could do, whether it was appeal to the professor or plan to find an adequate replacement for the hours.

I know athletes work at their sport like it’s a full-time job, and that’s why there is academic support. But somewhere, sometime in the last nine months, Scott should have known there was something wrong that needed to be fixed. Nobody is going to care about his degree progress and his eligibility more than him. It’s a cop-out to say that the academic staff dropped the ball, even though they must have at some point.

Why do we even have an academic staff? Athletes should be able to do this stuff on their own. And that goes for strength and conditioning as well. Why are we paying staff when the players themselves know what they should be doing?

I agree with Bob in Houston’s position exactly. These individuals need to take responsibility in entirety. They should have a press release from the player’s completely absolving Brian Davis and his inability to take action.

Strawman, HJ, strawman.

Not sure how you can defend Davis for not knowing that 3 players weren’t meeting NCAA degree progress requirements. That’s sort of his job. I’m not absolving the players, either. I expect the players to do what needs to be done in the classroom. I just wish the person who gets a fat salary to be their academic adviser made sure they were taking the correct classes.

“Why isn’t half the LSU football team or OU for that matter on academic suspension all the time?”

I can’t speak for these two lowlife institutions, but many schools have a “general studies” degree available. Texas does not.

Bob,

Reread what he wrote. Scott didn’t flunk out of UT, and knowing his degree plan is your strawman. I guess Scott could have ‘walked into an NCAA office’ and found out what their standards were to meet academic progress. Or a guy being paid by the athletic department to keep track of that shit could have made Scott aware.

Yeah, that would be a great recruiting pitch. Come to Texas where we have good academics and your son can be responsible for keeping track of all the requirements on his own while our salaried academic counseling staff lets him slip through the cracks!

We should be able to tell parents that their son will get a good education and will get a degree if he goes to class and works hard. This isn’t a Division II school. It’s a football powerhouse. We should be able to promise the kids and their parents that our well-paid staff will take care of their end of the bargain.

Don’t get me wrong. Scott shares some responsibility. But he is facing the consequences of not paying attention like he could have. What consequences will the support staff face for not paying attention like they are supposed to? If I’m Christian Scott’s dad I tell him that he needs to be responsible for his own academic career and take ownership of the problem. Then I call Mack Brown and ask him what the fuck happened because he promised me my son would be taken care of at Texas. Both parties are to blame.

How is that a straw man argument? He is not alluding to something that isn’t relevant to the conversation, he is providing a direct analogy that is a completely valid premise (albeit with a large degree of sarcasm and in question form).

People love to throw around the “straw man” argument whenever somebody makes a point that isn’t directly related to the conversation. Usually it is a reasonable deterrent to the conversation leading down that irrelevant and fallible path. In this case, BiH, you’re saying Scott should have done his work and don’t dump on the academic support staff—completely legitimate opinion. HJ is merely giving another example of an instance where guys (remember, still athletes, not random people) “could” or “should” know how to do something, but they don’t have the expertise of knowing how to do it the best way with the most efficiency.

Do you want Dex handling his weight training? No…Todd Wright is paid for that and therefore Dex has lost 80 pounds or whatever, as I’m sure ESPN has told you more than a few times. Do we want Christian Scott handling his academic intricacies…no, and this is why.

Duke of Ohio, it’s even simpler than that. OU has a fantastic academic support program, but not nearly the high academic standards of UT. You can get just as good of an education at OU as you can at UT. Texas is a better university, but OU isn’t some shithole. It’s a USNAWR top 100 school with some outstanding individual programs. The difference is that UT is going to give that high quality education to every single one of their students regardless of major. At OU, you have to be willing to take proactive steps to get it, and you’ve got to be within certain colleges. There’s just no competing with UT’s resources.

That said, UT needs to be at the absolute forefront of academic support. Let’s face it, a large number of football players aren’t that smart, and UT is one of the 20 best universities in America. There’s no excuse for this. UT failed on this one, too.

HJ sniffed out OU’s game plan. They’ve got a mole in our academic services staff. See Curtis Jones’ bio.

Nate, OU won’t use this against us in recruiting, will they?

Check out the guy immediately above Curtis Jones. Good to see we have a good math tutor for the players.

Sean Huckleberry, Academic Counselor
Sean Huckleberry is from San Antonio, Texas, and received his B.S. in kinesiology (sport management) from The University of Texas.

Huckleberry helps student-athletes plan their degree progressions, and interacts with everyone who comes into the academic offices.

Hey, I went to high school with Kat Richter. Cool.

Isn’t the problem that there are two standards, the school’s and the NCAA’s? After trying to digest all of this, my understanding is that Scott met UT’s requirements but did not meet the NCAA’s requirements. Athletes are the only students that deal with 2 different standards. While student athletes have the responsibility to know of both standards and meet them, I don’t have a problem with staff being there to help. I’m a smart guy but I remember being a little confused over my school’s degree requirements, and I could see how dealing with an additional standard could be even more confusing, especially if you are “in good standing” academically with the school. I’m guessing that NCAA standards have to be a little different for every school, so there’s probably not a clear list of things a guy like Scott has to do to pass NCAA muster.

D-1 schools all have staff devoted to NCAA compliance, it should be simple to have someone review athletes’ transcripts and identify who is not meeting NCAA standards or who is in jeopardy. Then explain to the student what he or she needs to do. Then its up to the student to do it. Whats wrong with that?

Huckleberry helps student-athletes plan their degree progressions…

Oops. My bad.

…and interacts with everyone who comes into the academic offices.

Having someone named Huckleberry serve as the interpersonal communicator is never a good idea.

Just talking out of my ass and from what my mom, who is faculty tells me, the NCAA doesn’t per se dictate your degree requirements, but rather needs proof of steady, consitent progress towards your degree of choice. Whether that’s quantum physics or kinesology, you have to show you are taking the classes the university requires you to take to get that degree, getting the grades necessary to accomplish that degree, and most importantly doing it on an appropriate time scale to receive your degree. The university isn’t going to monitor you progress, timewise, towards getting your degree. When Scott failed or incompleted a critical class to his degree progress and didn’t get it squared away in time, the NCAA dropped the hammer on him.

To me, that failure to keep abreast of the NCAA’s requirements falls SQUARELY on the support staff. It’s Scott’s responsibility to buckle down and pass his classes. It’s the support staff’s job to say “Hey man, you’ve got to retake Chemistry 102 and pass it in the spring or summer, or the NCAA is going to fuck you”.

The thought of the NCAA dropping the hammer on somebody for academics (or anything else) is such a load of horse shit you’ll need to make two trips to carry it all.

It’s the NCAA.

The fact that Christian Scott has decent grades at the University of Texas and is now ineligible and a ton of guys are making great progress toward their baking degree at KSU and are eligible really tells you a lot about how the NCAA has lost its way and the nature of big time collegiate athletics.

The NCAA is a ethically bankrupt, misguided organization. Even when they exhibit worthy principles they manage to completely misapply them.

And yeah, so long as this Kangaroo Court sits in judgment of our athletes, then we sure as shit better have a bunch of guys who have a team of guys whose sole job is to make sure these kids are in the right classes and are doing the work. If they aren’t, you let their position coach know. They can decide whether or not it’s the kid is worth trying to save or not with Mack Brown.

As Huck points out, this is big time college football and guys like Christian Scott are the types of guys who win big games for you by knocking somebody unconscious and popping a ball loose.

Well, yeah.

Hey KSU athelete, good job, you got a C in Human Performance Enhancement. Good Job.

Hey, Christian Scott, you didn’t haven’t passed Organic Chemistry yet, sit down.

Well, I don’t think Scott is taking organic chemistry or anything.

Well, if he did, and he failed the first exam and dropped it, then we would share something in common.

If anyone interested in this fiasco as it relates to Scott doesn’t think this falls directly in the lap of Brian Davis I would strongly encourage you to do more investigation on how the deal with Scott happened. The details have even been on the internet if you’ve looked in the right places. Arrogance and laziness are two common refrains from those who deal with him and work with him. I’m not just speculating or surmising here by the way.

Thank God he’s no longer in a position to drop turds on our hoops program.

Where the hell is Kurt Flood to help these guys? Football is a full-time job and a lot of these guys are not killing themselves trying to figure out if they are meeting every requirement demanded by the NCAA. That is the adviser’s job. If you have a sit-down with every player before the semester this should never happen. Also, there should be personnel to track all grades so they can get tutors when an athlete is in need. It only makes good financial/marketing sense. This is big business.

I agree with Sailor Ripley. The NCAA is like the Human Rights Council of the United Nations,
seriously flawed and unjust….

The strawman, to me, was comparing weight training with a degree plan. You can’t walk just walk into the football office and get a weight training regimen (that, for a scholarship athlete, most likely is individually developed). I imagine even a non-student could get a hold of a degree plan. How much common sense does it take to check off the stuff you have finished and see what you have left?

I also am not saying the support staff didn’t screw up. It most likely did, especially if the support staff handled everything from class selection to book orders. But at what point does it fall on the student to protect himself? If — a big if, but if — all he had to do was replace the failed course with another one, that seems like a pretty easy fix both for the player and for the staff member. That, to me, is the mystery. How did this get screwed up?

When you consider that Augie Garrido and Rick Barnes got fed up with Davis’ screw ups and removed their programs from Brian Davis’ supervision, it’s no so hard to understand how something preventable like this happened.

Chris Owens once asked me, on the last day of class, if I had completed my term paper yet. When I told him yes, the look of surprise on his face was…disconcerting.

Did he say your term paper or our term paper?

How much common sense does it take to check off the stuff you have finished and see what you have left?

More than most students have, I can tell you.

And the requirements for UT’s degrees got a lot more complicated beginning fall 2008 because of the 125 Commission (thanks, guys!) and the NCAA requirements for progress toward degree just got a lot more demanding.

None of the commentary on Bevo Beat seems to take account of this. I know you’re as shocked as I am.

I was always under the impression that as long as your grades are o.k., a regular student can pull a Van Wilder and take 6 years to graduate or whatever. You’re typical scholarship athlete? Not so much.

Am I wrong on this? At Bates, it was finish in four years or don’t come back.

How does this affect the team specifically?

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think of these guys like this:
Collins is a guy that Colt had trust in has lots of speed. He has better hands than Williams or Chiles and can get open so he’d be much better in pressure situations where we need some yards on third.

Scott, has better speed than Gideon or Brewster and a bigger hitter. He’d help us compete with the very athletic WRs. Maybe slightly more intimidating. Would he help in blitz’s or against the run?

What all this points to is some flaws in your academic advising department. Sure, kids have got to pass their classes. But the academic advising staff for the athletic department are the people who make sure that the planned courses are supporting a given degree program and that the kid is going to make adequate progress towards a degree each year to meet NCAA requirements.

The NCAA academic year is Fall/Spring/Summer, so the staff should review grades in January and meet with students to adjust what they’re doing in Spring/Summer, if needed. Then again in May, they verify what the kid has to do over the summer to remain eligible.

Huckelberry suggested above that Texas is not a Division II school. I can tell you that Division II schools also have a staff dedicated to making sure the scholarship athletes remain eligible.

I sympathize with Brandon and Christian, but they’re getting a lot more help than I did when I was in undergraduate studies. Now, if they swore off all parties, incidental social events, and general college “life” to do football and school and still couldn’t get past this, then that’s a different story. Still, if Mack Brown’s office calls me, I’m here to tutor ’em.

i believe the slippery slope here is the ‘late papers’ for scott. this all sounds like my freshman year at Baylor. walk on to the spring baseball program and i lasted all of four days.

i had an incomplete in Music Theory, a key required course in my degree field, and in my meeting with the academic counselor three days after i joined the team, the counselor said the incompletes dont fly with the NCAA, but are fine with the University for up to one calendar year after the resulting grade was to be issued. i would have to get a waiver from the instructor, dean, department chair and mentor/advisor in my degree field, in this case, Music.

Oh, and I had 48 hours to do so – this being the time remaining before which the next semester was to begin. hence, the friday before the spring term is to start, and i have to get 5 disparate faculty members to sign an NCAA petition just so i can practice with the team OR sit out the term until it was resolved AND/OR not step onto any BU athletic facilities. i had completed the coursework over the winter break, and was looking for the instructor to turn in her grade to the department.

this was all conveyed to me in a very tactful urgent meeting with the Baylor athletics ASSISTANT academic counselor.

but come monday morning the first day of classes, i either had to have had the university recorded the grade as corrected, or stop athletics till it was ALL resolved. and this at a university with 15K for enrollment. imagine this happening – nearly the SAME situation for CScott – at a place with total enrollment near or surpassed 100K.

needless to say, the ordeal went on into March, at which time, the season was half over and i never rejoined the team.

“i believe the slippery slope here is the ‘late papers’ for scott.”

Indeed… sometimes these things get messed up. One of my kids had this happen in a course. Assignments that had been completed were not recorded. It took a long, long time to get resolved — much longer (several months) than it should have, in my view.

People close to the program have many stories of Brain Davis’ incompetence. It finally bit the team in the ass publicly. He’s horrible.

@Taylor: We could try to use this incident against UT in recruiting. The obvious response about UT’s superior academic facilities and professors in most fields notwithstanding, of course.

@Ripley: “The NCAA is a ethically bankrupt, misguided organization.” And yet, the battle cry of the average UT fan is “But OU is a bunch of cheaters! Look at all their NCAA violations!” I’m not saying it makes our sordid history any better. I am saying that anyone relying on that is retarded.

Additionally, my brother was a bartender on 6th Street and lived in Austin for a couple of years between 2004-2006. When I asked him how some of the less-than-intelligent players that go to UT managed to stay eligible at one of America’s best universities, his response caught me off guard:
“Dude, have you never heard of Austin Community College? I’ve got a bunch of UT players in my classes there.”

That’s when it occurred to me that there’s no other legitimate explanation for guys like Jammal Charles and Vince Young staying eligible for three years. I’ve got the integrity to admit that at OU, while you can get an outstanding education/degree, you can also get a degree that’s not worthy enough for you to wipe your ass with it. It’s much easier to do. I wouldn’t imagine anyone having the same luck at UT. What convicts UT in this case is academic excellence. Ironic, really.

Nate, I was on academic scholarship at UT, and I took 3 classes at HCC during the Summer – for credit only.

Is your brother stating that UT football players were taking their full load at ACC? Because if they were taking a class here and a class there in order to get the credit, there would be a limit as to how much of that they could do, and would not eliminate the need to take and pass the majority of their coursework at UT.

BTW, my understanding of Charles is that, despite his oral communication style, he was not a bad student at all.

Scott and Collins both major in “Physical Culture and Sports.” Please stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by acting like they have more demanding academic loads than the athletes at any other school. They had 4 long semesters and 4 summer sessions to pass 48 hours in a major tailor-made for getting athletes through school, and they didn’t do it. They deserve plenty of blame here.

That’s not to say the support staff doesn’t deserve blame. They are actually even worse considering it’s their job to prevent this from happening. Even if it really shouldn’t take someone like Brian Davis to get these guys through their minimal academic requirements to stay eligible, it is nevertheless his job to oversee these players and he let something that should have been a cakewalk get royally screwed up.

Scott is not majoring in Physical Culture and Sports. Scott does have enough credits toward a degree. That is NOT the issue.

Nate, your brother may have had Longhorn football players in classes at ACC, but not for many classes. Most of the players are in the BS in Applied Learning and Development, Youth and Community Studies, path. The plan is here: https://www.edb.utexas.edu/education/assets/files/coe/degreeplans/08-10_YCS.pdf. Though it’s possible to transfer some courses from ACC, 60 total hours, and 24 of the last 30 hours have to be completed at UT. It would be very unusual for a player to take more than a few ACC courses, though one in Scott’s position clearly would have taken quite a few ACC hours this summer if he’d been fully versed in the issue he faced.

This should never have happened at Texas. You can damn well bet ou and others will use this in recruiting.

“Scott is not majoring in Physical Culture and Sports. "

The directory on utexas.edu says he is. That is also the listed major for Collins.

We gearuntee akudimic prahgrezz.

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