Academic Bowl Championship Series | ESPN/Tuesday Morning Quarterback

Communications — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:57:00 -0500

Lindsey Luebchow of the New America Foundation asks that question here. She concludes that if academics were factored into big-college football, ...

ESPN Features Academic Bowl Championship Series, Lindsey Luebchow

Communications — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:31:00 -0500

In a few days, hooded figures manipulating mysterious computer formulas will announce the final BCS standings and the lineup for college football's prestigious bowl games. Records, opponents, conference affiliations, polls and, it always seems, the phases of the moons of Saturn will be taken into account. But what if academics were factored in, too? What if there were an A/BCS -- an Academics-Included Bowl Championship Series?

I put that question to Lindsey Luebchow, a policy analyst of the New America Foundation and a contributor to Higher Ed Watch, one of the country's best blogs. Luebchow relentlessly dissects hypocrisy, double-talk and yammer in higher education, especially the big colleges' relationships to Congress. She is also a sports nut, and annually computes what the men's basketball Sweet 16 would look like based on educational achievement. So I asked her to do the same for the top 25 BCS teams.

Appropriately, Luebchow came up with a ratings procedure that's hard to understand -- just like the real BCS! Her reasoning: "The A/BCS formula starts with the football team's four-class average federal graduation rate, which includes all football players who entered college between 1997 and 2000 and graduated within six years. Football programs then… more