Wall Street Journal ranked us virtually second

Oct 18, 2013, 8:09 AM

for our football program with our academic prestige:

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COLLEGE FOOTBALL Updated August 28, 2013, 9:40 p.m. ET
College Football's Grid of Shame
As the season begins, we rate how good all 125 teams are—and how embarrassed their alums should be.
By RACHEL BACHMAN CONNECT
It's easy to judge a college-football program from afar. To properly praise and ridicule, one needs hard data.

As the season begins Thursday, The Wall Street Journal presents its third annual grid of shame. Because college football is as much about scandal as it is about sport, we have rated all 125 major-college teams on two axes: how good they're projected to be on the field and how shameful their activities have been off of it.

How Good (or Bad) is Your Team?

Here is how all 125 major-college teams rate, on the field and off.

The ratings are systematic. To rank the teams' 2013 prospects, we calculated a composite of four 1-through-125 rankings: Athlon, Lindy's, the Orlando Sentinel and football guru Phil Steele. The shame component is based on five categories: each team's four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) figure, the metric the NCAA uses to assess academic performance; recent history of major violations and probation; percentage of athletic-department revenues subsidized by student fees; number of player arrests in the off-season, and a purely subjective, overall "ick" factor. (Sorry, Penn State.)

The results show how loudly you should crow at your next tailgate—or whether you should consider using your diploma as a coaster.

Plenty of attention and scrutiny faces college football ahead of the opening kickoff, from Johnny Manziel, to teams switching leagues, to new conferences taking shape. Mike Aresco, head of the new American Athletic Conference, joins MoneyBeat. Photo: AP.

This year, the geeks are taking over. Academic stalwarts Stanford and Northwestern rank among the winners. So does Notre Dame—although the Manti Te'o fake-girlfriend fiasco sent the Fighting Irish plummeting toward the "embarrassing" axis.

But other programs have weaknesses that need to be corrected before they're brag-worthy. Tennessee has a new, 145,000-square-foot training center with a "thunderdome of power" weight room, according to a promotional video. But the Volunteers, besides struggling in recent years on the field, have been relative weaklings in the classroom: Their APR ranks 120th.

Florida International extracted more than $18 million of its $25 million in 2011-12 revenues in the form of student fees. Not only is that a heavy burden in an era of rising tuitions, it's a direct threat to beer money.

It could be time to redefine "Clemsoning," a synonym for imploding amid high expectations. In the past year, Clemson has climbed in the rankings behind quarterback Tajh Boyd and avoided catastrophe off the field. It seems the eighth-ranked Tigers' biggest worry—other than facing No. 5 Georgia on Saturday—is the off-season vandalism of Howard's Rock, the iconic stone that Clemson players rub before games for luck.

Texas A&M's reputation had taken a hit before star quarterback Johnny Manziel received a half-game suspension Wednesday for Saturday's opener against Rice. Three defensive players already were suspended for the Rice game—one for half of it, two for its entirety—for off-season brushes with the law.

To see how these and every other major-college team fared, see the accompanying graphic.

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Wall Street Journal ranked us virtually second

In 1 year we moved from slightly embarrassing to very

well for one Clowney's not the face of your program***

Vanderbelt only slightly embarrassing???

Not surprised....Go Tigers!!***

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