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Sports

Stanford Football Players Trading Game Time For Good Grades

Only an estimated 50 percent of football players play all four years, suggesting that academia is pulling them away from the field.

When the Stanford football team jogged off the field after their impressive 52-17 victory over Sacramento State earlier this month, the enthused eyes of almost every fan in the stadium were on the new edition of Cardinal football and the stadium was abuzz with excited chatter.

With this momentum-building start, a newly-released Associated Press Top 25 national ranking, and coming off one of its most successful seasons in history, the future of Stanford football is looking brighter than ever. But many fans are forgetting the student athletes who make the legacy of Stanford football what it is today. 

Not every student athlete who is either recruited or walks on to an NCAA Division I football team is destined to experience the amount of success that leads to national fame. A simple calculation using Stanford football's archived rosters for the 2004-2010 seasons reveals a low retention rate, with an average of 50 percent of players in each class leaving the team during the course of their collegiate careers.

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Only seven of 24 players from the Class of 2010 played their true senior season. Twenty-one members of the class of 2008 joined the team, but only 11 played in their senior season. In the class of 2009, twenty players joined the team their freshman year, but only 14played through four years of eligibility. The team roster ranges from between 90 and 100 players, meaning that the team relies on the incoming classes to fill the vacated spots.

But where do all these other players go? Perhaps the low retention rate can be attributed to football players' academic aspirations. The football team's 89 percent graduation rate is ranked seventh in the nation and leads the Pac-10, which averages a 59.8 percent graduation rate, according to Fox Sports and Scout.com's blog "The Bootleg."

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Other Pac-10 schools' graduation rates pale in comparison, like second-best Washington's 69 percent, University of California Berkeley's 64 percent and Arizona's 41 percent. These rates indicate that nearly 9 out of 10 Stanford football players are finishing their collegiate careers and moving on to a professional job, whether it's with the National Football League or something equally impressive on or in another field.

The truth is, the players who ran, caught, tackled and sweated between the lines of the Louis W. Foster Family Field Saturday afternoon are merely the tip of the iceberg. Behind them, supporting them and driving them to success are dozens of other student athletes who, for however briefly, donned the Cardinal jersey and forever left their imprint on the program.

Take, for example, Chase Richard, a junior Human Biology major out of the nearby Menlo School. Richard was treated for a nagging foot injury which cost him his freshman season. He then spent the winter conditioning and returned for the spring season, but left the team before the Spring Game.

Richard's decision was affirmed during that summer when he was accepted to the Amgen Scholars Program, and given the chance to spend the summer undertaking undergraduate research.

"I had to make a choice," Richard said. "I didn't go to Stanford to try and make the [National Football League]."

Richard added in a later interview, "Every day I regret my decision to quit, but every day I know I made the right decision. I can help a lot more people in my life through medicine than I can with football."

In addition to the games, practices, and work-outs, Richard said the intensive Human Biology core added hours of classes, studying, and homework for a total of 50 hours a week.

"I simply wasn't able to do it," he said. "I was forced to give that up and call it quits."

Richard did not return to the team for his sophomore season, and has instead focused on pursuing stem cell research at the university's Irving Weissman lab, in addition to his Human Biology course load. In Richard's experience, he said his decision to leave the team did not negatively affect his relationship with his former teammates.

"I'm still real good buds with everyone on the team," he said. "Everyone's cool."

Many of the players who have left the team (but were unavailable for comment) said they have no negative feelings toward the coach or the team.

Alex Menke, also a junior, similarly did not return for his sophomore season. While he was unavailable for a phone interview, he is currently preparing to travel abroad to Berlin with David Holloway of the History department through Stanford's Bing Overseas Program.

Jeremy Bailenson, an associate professor of Communication and director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, said that football players make up a relatively large portion of the students he teaches and advises.

"In general I usually have at least one football player working in my lab in a hands-on research practicum per year (one or two of about 20 per year)," Bailenson wrote in an email interview. "In my larger lecture classes that typically have about 100 students, I have between five and ten football players."

He went on to explain that while the football team has a "great infrastructure" for ensuring that student athletes can stay up-to-date with class work and exams, many students (including his), are required to take exams on the same day as their classmates back on-campus. This is one of the many factors that can complicate the balance between athletics and academics, he said.

This issue raises a greater concern for collegiate athletics on a widespread scale. The focus of many college football programs is statistical success and high winning percentages. Perhaps, stories like Chase Richard's and Alex Menke's advocate something different.

The Stanford football team has produced many talented NFL players over the years including Jim Plunkett, John Elway, Trent Edwards and Toby Gerhart. But, it has also fostered thousands of professionals who make their marks on the world as we know it in other-- just as important--ways. Many of them, like Mike McLaughlin, the center who led Stanford to the Rose Bowl in 2000, are still involved with Stanford athletics. San Francisco's Examiner.com reported that McLaughlin is currently working for Cisco Systems in their emerging technology group, and also as a part-time radio broadcaster for Stanford.

College football is an opportunity of a lifetime, but that opportunity is not limited to professional athletes. According to the university, Stanford's Class of 2014 was one of the most competitive classes nationwide with an acceptance rate of 7.2 percent, evidence that some of the best and brightest students in the nation will continue to uphold the university's standard of excellence for years to come.

For the many incoming student athletes, specifically football players, no one can predict what will become of them. Factors like injury, academic opportunities, scheduling conflicts, and incoming classes of new talent may very well guide some of them away from football and towards other opportunities.

These players are on their way to joining the over 185,000 Stanford degree holders that span 142 countries, 18 territories and 50 states, according to the Stanford Alumni Association. Perhaps academic pursuits should not be considered consolation for these student athletes, but rather an equally valid accomplishment.

Meanwhile, the tradition of Stanford football is alive and well. On August 30th, Stanford football reported that a record-breaking 1000 youth football players and 400 fans flocked to the annual football open house minicamp led by former Stanford football players, some with NFL experience.

Recently, Stanford's director of athletics, Bob Bowlsby, spoke to the New York Times about the relationship between athletics and academics at the university, with specific regard to Stanford's exemplary graduation rate.

"I think it's kind of baked into the culture," he said. "The graduation rates and grade-point averages of the university's roughly 850 athletes track closely with Stanford's nearly 6,900 undergraduate students," adding, "I think it's just one other way where Stanford strives to be world-class at what it does."

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