Shaw is right that we will live and die by our current standards.
We will not relax academic standards any more than we already have. We got as much as we are going to get when Mamlet was ousted--which I think had more to do with our football resurgence even than Harbaugh did. Mamlet really did hold our football players to the same academic standards as everyone else--and it nearly destroyed the program--though Walt and Buddy take the blame. The University has made as many academic concessions to football as it ever will.
Furthermore, accepting more transfer students would itself be an academic concession, and Stanford won't do that. Graduates from Stanford need, on the whole, to have four years of a Stanford education or else the meaning of the name Stanford on a diploma is correspondingly weakened. Stanford has only admitted as many transfers as are required to fill the slots of the handful of students who drop out or stop out. Giving football players a pass on this would just be too big a departure from Stanford's longstanding policy.
As for NIL consortiums and other ways to legally bribe players--I similarly think that won't happen. Most Stanford alums care more about comparing us with other elite academic institutions, not against football powerhouses. When we seek to attract the best and brightest faculty, the top graduate students, and the most accomplished undergraduates--they are more apt to be turned off if Stanford develops a reputation for that kind of legalized corruption and may be inclined to go to the Ivies instead. There is a reason why the other monied R1 Div I university in California is nowhere close to Stanford's level of excellence. I know faculty who would never be caught dead at USC, for no other reason than the association with their corrupt athletics. Stanford will always choose to be more like the Ivies, not more like USC.
So we don't have a lot of options. But here is what I think. If Stanford cannot be good at football while upholding its integrity and academic standards, then college football is no longer something I am interested in watching. I'd rather watch the pros than this caricature of the amateur ideal. I'm still hoping against hope that Stanford finds a way to pull it off.
We will not relax academic standards any more than we already have. We got as much as we are going to get when Mamlet was ousted--which I think had more to do with our football resurgence even than Harbaugh did. Mamlet really did hold our football players to the same academic standards as everyone else--and it nearly destroyed the program--though Walt and Buddy take the blame. The University has made as many academic concessions to football as it ever will.
Furthermore, accepting more transfer students would itself be an academic concession, and Stanford won't do that. Graduates from Stanford need, on the whole, to have four years of a Stanford education or else the meaning of the name Stanford on a diploma is correspondingly weakened. Stanford has only admitted as many transfers as are required to fill the slots of the handful of students who drop out or stop out. Giving football players a pass on this would just be too big a departure from Stanford's longstanding policy.
As for NIL consortiums and other ways to legally bribe players--I similarly think that won't happen. Most Stanford alums care more about comparing us with other elite academic institutions, not against football powerhouses. When we seek to attract the best and brightest faculty, the top graduate students, and the most accomplished undergraduates--they are more apt to be turned off if Stanford develops a reputation for that kind of legalized corruption and may be inclined to go to the Ivies instead. There is a reason why the other monied R1 Div I university in California is nowhere close to Stanford's level of excellence. I know faculty who would never be caught dead at USC, for no other reason than the association with their corrupt athletics. Stanford will always choose to be more like the Ivies, not more like USC.
So we don't have a lot of options. But here is what I think. If Stanford cannot be good at football while upholding its integrity and academic standards, then college football is no longer something I am interested in watching. I'd rather watch the pros than this caricature of the amateur ideal. I'm still hoping against hope that Stanford finds a way to pull it off.