[Oasis]

"Our competitors select for athletic ability and hope the academic side will limp in just enough."

If this were truly the case, you'd never lose a recruiting battle to anyone else after making your golden ticket schollie offer. Yet you still do. I am curious to know how those '"lost" players suddenly become cretinous by going elsewhere and wind up simply hoping to limp by academically.

You have fallen into the fallacy of composition. The point of comparison is not the individual recruit but the overall programs.  Take the whole team.  Ask whether the players would be at good colleges if they weren't athletes.  I would venture to say that Stanford's whole team would.  Not all of them would be at Stanford, Princeton or Yale (some would) but they'd all be in a serious academic place.  In other words, take away Andrew Luck's ability to play quarterback and you still have the high school valedictorian.  Now do that globally for our whole team and you still have serious to excellent students. Take away your guys' football ability and what've you got?

[Oasis]

"Our competitors select for athletic ability and hope the academic side will limp in just enough."

If this were truly the case, you'd never lose a recruiting battle to anyone else after making your golden ticket schollie offer. Yet you still do. I am curious to know how those '"lost" players suddenly become cretinous by going elsewhere and wind up simply hoping to limp by academically.

You have fallen into the fallacy of composition. The point of comparison is not the individual recruit but the overall programs.  Take the whole team.  Ask whether the players would be at good colleges if they weren't athletes.  I would venture to say that Stanford's whole team would.  Not all of them would be at Stanford, Princeton or Yale (some would) but they'd all be in a serious academic place.  In other words, take away Andrew Luck's ability to play quarterback and you still have the high school valedictorian.  Now do that globally for our whole team and you still have serious to excellent students. Take away your guys' football ability and what've you got?