There has to be a research project in here someplace. The U. S. News league tables are out, with the usual suspects in the top ten or twenty. There's not much overlap between those league tables and the recently released pre-season football polls. Here's the research anomaly: Boise State, a relative newcomer to the college football stratosphere has, for the first time, garnered enough votes in the preseason polls to have a realistic shot, should its football team go unbeaten, to play in the so-called national championship game. (There is a lot of path-dependence in the football playoff system, and last year's undefeated team faced the double disadvantage of entering the season as the favorite from a relatively weak conference, giving it too low a start to earn a shot at Alabama or Texas). That's an anomaly because it took Boise a relatively short time to develop a reputation in football. Developing an academic reputation strikes me as much harder: administrations have to commit to competing for stronger faculty; department chairmen and existing faculties have to be willing to hire people who are objectively better scholars than they are, and at tenure time to view their records as a feature, not a threat; graduate students have to lift their games; undergraduates have to be socialized to approach college as something more serious than a five-year party.But to have any impact, administrations and trustees must get on board right now, before the first [Florida International] and [Miami, Florida] games of the season — and before sports further drain diminishing university funds.
With the economic downturn, there never was a better time to rebalance growing disparities between sports and academic spending.
The football route to national prominence might be cheaper and easier.
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