UCLA superstar quarterback Josh Rosen clearly isn’t a fan of the loose academic standards for football players at Alabama.
Rosen gave a very in-depth interview with Bleacher Report Tuesday, and he didn’t hold back one bit when it came to the standards for athletes in college, and how they vary by the school.
He told Bleacher Report in part:
I didn’t say that, you did. (Laughs.) Look, football and school don’t go together. They just don’t. Trying to do both is like trying to do two full-time jobs. There are guys who have no business being in school, but they’re here because this is the path to the NFL. There’s no other way. Then there’s the other side that says raise the SAT eligibility requirements. OK, raise the SAT requirement at Alabama and see what kind of team they have. You lose athletes and then the product on the field suffers.
There’s nothing like a little trash talk to get everybody fired up for football season. I know several Alabama football fans. They’re fun people, they love the Tide and I’m sure they’d disagree with Rosen’s sentiments.
However, it’s hard to argue with the logic he’s using. Even Stanford coach David Shaw famously trashed the idea of recruiting in the South when he stated, “It doesn’t make sense for us to go hold a camp some place where there might be one person in the entire state that’s eligible to get into Stanford.”
UCLA is one of the best schools in America. Any ranking you look at has it near the top, and schools in the upper echelon, generally speaking, don’t allow a ton of wiggle room for athletes. Northwestern is famous for how rigorous its standards are for admitting athletes. It goes without saying that the easier the admissions process is the better the team will be.
As former Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.”