recruiters and vice-versa. Certainly there are plenty of examples of both.

YOU can refuse to believe that Blue Turf is anything but a decade ago, and even now people know about it. It is noteworthy, it is something people talk about, similar in a marketing way to all the different uniforms that Oregon has that people talk about and either love or hate. But BSU did it for marketing and it helped get them noticed.

You cite Stanford as an example, I can just as easily cite Vandy and Northwestern as examples the other way, even a tough school like Notre Dame lowered their standards to allow a few elite players each year to get in and it helped them to win a national championship. But Stanford is the rarity as I think we can agree.

THought this was interesting: "In 2004, all-time Notre Dame great Paul Horning made it clear that the school should ease up on academic restrictions. Horning told ESPN's Dan Patrick that former coach Lou Holtz showed him a list of the top-50 recruits and explained that the university's admissions office would only allow him to recruit three players on the list.

Horning felt in the late 1980s, when Notre Dame won its last national championship, that academic standards were eased. He used Tony Rice, the quarterback of that team, as an example. Horning explained that Rice, at that time, was one of only two Prop 48 players to ever play for Notre Dame. He told Patrick, "Tony Rice honored himself and graduated in four years."

Aron Gopal, of the Daily Grind, when talking about the Holtz era, said, "In the 1980s, Notre Dame wasn't much more than a football school. Consequently, Holtz could recruit anyone he wanted, including non-qualifiers like Rice." In 2001, when Gopal made this statement, he said, "Notre Dame supporters have yet to grasp that things have changed at Notre Dame." He went on to point out that Notre Dame was on academic par with schools like Vanderbilt and Georgetown. Regarding the calculus requirement for all freshmen, Gopal said, "It prevented Bob Davie from recruiting T.J. Duckett and David Terrell, both of who wanted to go to Notre Dame but couldn't pass calculus." http://bleacherreport.com/articles/296044-notre-dames-next-coach-will-demand-lower-academic-standards