
Originally Posted by
thundarsdaddy
Since 1994, when the Division 1-A schools were forced to hand out only 85 scholarships, there has always been a war for high quality football players. Division 1-AA, is allowed 63 FT scholarships these days.
Couple this declining number, with the fact that the NCAA demands that all athletes, not just football players,must maintain grades.
This is a drastic change from the 70's, when Div 1-A gave away 105 scholarships, and could give them to seemingly anyone, grades or no grades.
In a nutshell todays football player must not only be good, but must also be a good student in the classroom.
NDSU has always been at the TOP in these catagories, for decades!!
But, it went mostly un-noticed being in Division 2.
Nowadays, the reality is this, most of the BigTime College football programs, get..."first-dibs" on the best student/athelete. But with the limit on the scholarships...more and more are available to the Div 1-AA schools, thus you can see why these schools can, under the right circumstances field a very good football team, capable of beating a Div 1-A team!!
OK...every Bison fan knows this already..right??
Here's the problem!
Not ALL highly recruited football players are both good players and good students! Add to this, is there are some outstanding football players who dont have the scholastic backround to be given a FT scholarship to a program, suchas, Minnesota, so they choose NDSU!
If NDSU takes them!
It sometimes becomes a real coin-toss for the Coach to decide if this type of athlete is worth a scholarship!!
And some of these football players are simply USING a Div 1-AA school, as a spring board to a Div 1-A program, if they can shine on the field.
And this attitude, in my opinion contributes to a lack of teamwork on the field.
Now, I"m not saying this is whats happening at NDSU, but you can sure see things with schools like SIU or UNI, as witnessed on saturday!!
Tons of penalties and poor sportsmanship!!
These are qualities that NDSU does NOT want!
I still maintain, get a good football player, who is a decent student(which is common across both Minnesota and North Dakota), but has Bison Pride...and you will see winning records once again!!