[Mick]

It's an extraordinary risk to play at a football factory if a player has the intellectual capacity to succeed at Stanford.

I am not convinced this is true anymore, if it ever was. For a player that is actually interested in getting an education and possibly pursuing a career that values "credentials" it may still be true. However since today's society values style over substance you can get lots of followers on twitter and thereby be arguably in a position to "network" as well as any Stanford graduate can. You need not actually know anything to do that, as is demonstrated every day.
 
IMO there are lots of people intending to enter the "business" world that can easily do so with a degree from e.g. Colorado, Alabama, or UCF. The "networking" available to a football player at those schools may actually be more valuable, at least in the near term, than the Stanford network ever would be. Why attend Stanford, a school that hates fun where you may have to work very diligently, in order to major in Science, Technology, and Society? Why is a similar degree from <insert name here> demonstrably of less value? I am not convinced it is, but more importantly it will not be at all obvious to most prospective Stanford football players that it is. That makes it a very hard sell, especially when all the other schools recruiting the player will challenge the notion.

Right, that was my entire point. It is a difficult sell, but not an impossible one. If I sit down with a teenaged football player and tell him he'd have a better life if he went to Stanford irrespective of the football outcome, and spend five minutes on the discussion with a few statistics and some bland points, it won't move the needle. But if I spend 1/2 hour on all the great outcomes that a Stanford education has over his adult lifetime compared with the likely results at football factories, it would at least give him pause. If you go to a football factory, you can play in the NFL. Same with Stanford, 22nd most NFL players among D1 schools.

But the odds of achieving anything outside of the NFL are much slimmer at a football factory, if you're the kind of player who can manage the academic workload at Stanford. My guess is that if you listed 50 Stanford football alumni, starting with Mr. Packard, you would have some extraordinary achievers that other schools can't match. Any school can list five, even ten. But fifty? Or a hundred? The other part of it is the downside, most schools don't talk about that...here's the unsuccessful alumni. I doubt Stanford has many really unsuccessful football alumni. That should be part of the discussion.

[Mick]

It's an extraordinary risk to play at a football factory if a player has the intellectual capacity to succeed at Stanford.

I am not convinced this is true anymore, if it ever was. For a player that is actually interested in getting an education and possibly pursuing a career that values "credentials" it may still be true. However since today's society values style over substance you can get lots of followers on twitter and thereby be arguably in a position to "network" as well as any Stanford graduate can. You need not actually know anything to do that, as is demonstrated every day.
 
IMO there are lots of people intending to enter the "business" world that can easily do so with a degree from e.g. Colorado, Alabama, or UCF. The "networking" available to a football player at those schools may actually be more valuable, at least in the near term, than the Stanford network ever would be. Why attend Stanford, a school that hates fun where you may have to work very diligently, in order to major in Science, Technology, and Society? Why is a similar degree from <insert name here> demonstrably of less value? I am not convinced it is, but more importantly it will not be at all obvious to most prospective Stanford football players that it is. That makes it a very hard sell, especially when all the other schools recruiting the player will challenge the notion.

Right, that was my entire point. It is a difficult sell, but not an impossible one. If I sit down with a teenaged football player and tell him he'd have a better life if he went to Stanford irrespective of the football outcome, and spend five minutes on the discussion with a few statistics and some bland points, it won't move the needle. But if I spend 1/2 hour on all the great outcomes that a Stanford education has over his adult lifetime compared with the likely results at football factories, it would at least give him pause. If you go to a football factory, you can play in the NFL. Same with Stanford, 22nd most NFL players among D1 schools.

But the odds of achieving anything outside of the NFL are much slimmer at a football factory, if you're the kind of player who can manage the academic workload at Stanford. My guess is that if you listed 50 Stanford football alumni, starting with Mr. Packard, you would have some extraordinary achievers that other schools can't match. Any school can list five, even ten. But fifty? Or a hundred? The other part of it is the downside, most schools don't talk about that...here's the unsuccessful alumni. I doubt Stanford has many really unsuccessful football alumni. That should be part of the discussion.