I should first state a bias that I really dislike Greg Easterbrook as a writer for ESPN.  That being said:<p>This article is terrible.<p>His main thesis is that you don't have to lower academic standards in order to be successful at football.  Since the poster didn't even use this as the title, I wonder whether this is even worth discussing, but I'll quickly summarize.  In the same way that you don't HAVE to have 300+ pound players to be successful at football, you don't have to lower academic standards to be successful, but you're limiting your talent pool, and it will make success harder.  This is like saying that you don't HAVE to have a bug tracking system at your startup in order to be successful, but you sure are limiting yourself if you don't.<p>Then there is his thesis that's the title of the post, which is that it's a myth that playing football at a big-deal college gets you into the nfl.  This is trivially true, and I don't think worth noting.  This would be like saying "Myth: going to college at an ivy league school makes you a millionare".  Sure, that's true, but your likelihood goes WAY up if you attend one of the top tier schools. In the article he fails to connect the dots when he reports on USC and Miami that a player is ~6 times more likely to go to the NFL compared to attending an average division 1 school.<p>To some posters comments, I disagree that a D1 football player who is on scholarship is just as prepared for life as a diligent student.  First, having good grades from a college will open more doors for you later in life, whether it be grad school, getting interviews, etc.  Whether this is right or fair can be argued, but it is the state of affairs.  Secondly, in many cases football players are forced to light load courses while they play and take at least 5 years to graduate, and often once their eligibility runs out after 4 years, their grades that were good enough for them to stay enrolled while they played football suddenly aren't good enough to keep them enrolled as a non-athlete student.  This happens all the time, and why for academic awards the graduation rate of the team (or athletic program as a whole) is often inspected.  But I do agree if you compare an athlete against an average to below average student who drank and borrowed their way through school, the athlete may be better off.  They may have some semblance of work ethic, and at least they're not in debt.