The SEC made a quiet change to their academic policies regarding non-qualifiers at their meetings in Destin. The new policies would allow more non-qualifiers to begin school and bring their grades up prior to playing for a given school’s team. Each must be approved by SEC Commissioner Mike Slive. To provide the pro- and con- sides of the issue are Buxton Lewis the 4th and one promising non-qualifier football recruit.

I am appalled by this, and by my maid’s ineptitude, as well.

Point: Athletics Are Dangerously Compromised By This New Ruling and I Am Appalled By This.

As a prominent local businessman and graduate of the University, I cannot state strongly enough how appalled I am by the new policies regarding academics and athletes. I, like anyone else, enjoy watching my team play competitive football on Saturdays, and pay good money to the athletic department for a modest fifty-seat box, personal champagne bath to watch games from, and make sure that despite sending my children to private schools, they understand and appreciate the traditions of college football by attending games at my alma mater.

Excuse me.

Consuela! If there’s dust on the mantle like last week I will be very, very displeased! La migra! you understand that, don’t you? LA MIGRA VIENE AQUI! Rapido clean-o, por favor.

I apologize. You see, this is a slippery slope for we fans of the game. Where do we draw the line? At actually funding public schools that fail these non-qualifying recruits from day one? Preposterous. I live in a rural county. Do you know what it would take to educate these people? Hammers and cookies, that’s what, and my dollars and cookies aren’t paying the tab, buster. I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps without a football scholarship, and I’m sure that with proper management of their inheritances and trust funds, you’ll find they can too.

If anything, non-qualifying recruits are living proof that our public schools aren’t failing, but working. A good student in a nice public school already survives countless trials my children, for example, do not enjoy the privilege of surviving, like choking on the mysterious gray cheese on their pizzas, for example. At a bad public school, though, only the fittest of the fit survive. Can your child ace an essay test with a shiv stuck in their side, or conduct a full chemistry experiment using only a lighter, a bottle of Robitussin, a coffee pot and some ammonia? I didn’t think so.

Non-qualifiers have only themselves to blame, and football does not need them to succeed.

CONSUELA! THE BLINDS! DO I HEAR INS? RAPIDO LIMPIO, CHICA!

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