Randy Walker, head football coach
Northwestern University
The Sporting News

"We are adding games and reducing practice time. And not only are we reducing practice time, but we also have reduced scholarships. Those effects -- less players, less practice, more games -- that's not good. If we want to keep adding games, we need to look at personnel. Adding scholarships is a dirty word. We all are about cost containment."

Dan Radakovich, senior associate athletics director
Louisiana State University
The Sporting News

"A year from now, as people begin to look toward their 2004-05 budgets, they will see this gap created. At that point, they'll say, 'We need to be able to do this.' I don't know what the quid pro quo will be from the football side of things, but there is a real possibility of a groundswell of support to continue to play the 12 games."

Graduation rates

Michael Wilbon, columnist
Washington Post

" 'Graduation rate' doesn't take into account how different the mission ought to be for a state school and private school. It doesn't speak to the dramatic life enhancement that can result from going to college on an athletics scholarship, regardless of whether a degree is achieved. ...

"Do we really want to suggest that the state institutions of Arkansas or Maryland or Ohio have the same educational mission as private schools such as Duke or Vanderbilt or Northwestern? I'd hope not. You know what chance there was that Grant Hill wouldn't graduate from Duke? Zero. It was an open layup he'd graduate. Calvin and Janet Hill guaranteed that with the environment they established for their son, and the example of their own educational achievement. Yale and Wellesley, that's where Grant's father and mother went to school. College wasn't just expected of Grant Hill; it was mandatory, automatic, the minimum required.

"Compare that with most Division I football and basketball players. Way more often than most folks know, the kids playing in the tournament we've been watching all month are the first members of their family to set foot on a college campus. There's no clue whatsoever about the climb ahead, little preparedness, little in the way of pertinent advice. ...

"State universities in particular have an obligation, given the constituencies they serve, to do everything possible to help those kids grow and prepare to meet life's challenges. I wonder how far some of those kids who didn't graduate from Arkansas had to go just to get to the starting line. Does a degree adequately measure the value of the college experience in their lives? ...

"(Schools) can be more creative and vigilant in helping students work toward a degree. No question most of these kids have to be worked with more tenaciously because many weren't adequately prepared in high school.

"But the last thing I'd want to see is so much emphasis put on graduation rates that kids are processed with little regard to the sheer experience of college. That just allows a school to show off self-serving and flawed statistics, hollow numbers that don't tell us very much at all what some of these kids gain from attending college and what schools and the culture at large gain from trying to educate them."