# Choppin Wood

Coach Moorehead has been saying this on Twitter every time the Hokies got a comittment, and he posted this 1 hour ago...

Choppin Wood #Hokies

Anyone? Anything? Melvin Keihn perhaps?

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Comments

Tabyus Taylor...?

"Yeah, it do." - Mike Vick

Didn't see a commit, but I saw he linked this article #LetsGoHokies:

You never hear that because that's bad for business. The NCAA doesn't want to talk about graduation rates. Division I football players [have an] overall graduation rate of 55 percent. That's not only below students at the comparable universities as a whole football players should graduate at a higher rate. They get five years. They don't have to pay for college. They get special tutoring. It's never mentioned by the NCAA or any of its partner networks because it's bad for business. Three years ago, Stanford and Virginia Tech met in the Orange Bowl. That game was the highest combined graduation rate in football bowl history, and neither the network nor the NCAA said anything about it. They want the bar to be kept low.

... [Virginia Tech has] 20 consecutive winning seasons at the big-deal football level and 77 percent graduation rate ... for its football players. Very admirable track record. Most colleges don't have admirable track records. Some places, it's terrible. LSU, when they won the national championship five years ago their football graduation rate was 44 percent. But did you hear that on ESPN? Fox? CBS? Of course not.

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/24/225775287/nfls-a-nonprofit-author-says-its...

This is a great angle. And this is very good for the university. One thing that I wonder, does players leaving early count against graduation rates? If a player leaves, is he omitted from the overall number of players because if they leave early and count against; than teams with players who go pro at a higher rate will have a lower graduation %.

The Dude Abides

From my understanding, it counts in the rating. So if players leave early for the NFL, the graduation rate suffers. However, the rating doesn't speak to those that get graduate degrees, or double major, or the like, which I know VT has a lot of athletes that do that.

I want to know what the rate is when we take out for the guys that sign a contract with the NFL or other professional team.
It would not be fair to count those numbers.
Wilson, Hosely, etc. they count against the graduation rate.

This is going to be great for the ACC.

At the same time, LSU puts a whole lot more players into the NFL than we do and there graduation rate would be much higher if early NFL draftees were considered.

Still, props to VT - - thats very impressive.

A better metric might be the graduation rate of players that don't leave early for the NFL. I still think the likes of LSU would fall far short.

That said, many moons ago, I was in an advanced writing class taught by, well, let's just say it is one of VT's bigger faculty stars. Several football players were taking the class as well.

And by "taking" I mean sitting in about as many days as they weren't, turning in rubbish papers on occasion, and enjoying very soft grading that the regular students weren't afforded, (and to the credit of most of us, didn't want.)

I'm not going to get any more specific than that, as I truly respect the faculty member outside of this one practice, and when the players were actually in class, the professor did manage to get them to participate in activities rather than let them just sit there and act like it was a waste of their time.

Point being, even though our grad rate by every metric is better than most others, there is often a different grading scale at play between athletes and the regular student body.

I've heard all the excuses about how some people should be afforded more lenient grading due to background and such, but certainly my background as a poor person with crappy no-advanced math from small-town Va wasn't good enough to get me a free pass in 5 hour calc and keep me in Engineering, where I was getting A's & B's.

But for all the flaws, at least we can always take pride that we aren't a public Ivy like UNC with fake classes invented just for athletes.

All hat, as they say, and no catel.

turning in rubbish papers on occasion, and enjoying very soft grading that the regular students weren't afforded, (and to the credit of most of us, didn't want.)

Out of curiosity, how do you know they received favorable grades? Did you read their papers?

I'm not doubting what your saying, I'm just wondering how it was so blatant.

We read our stuff aloud on occasion, and they participated. And they weren't shy about showing off their B's & C's for what was essentially grade-school writing.

Again -- I appreciate that they participated on occasion, and they were good guys, and I learned plenty from the professor; they didn't detract from anyone else's ability to get the max from the class. Just, all other things equal, they never should have been in that class.

I would have been upset if I'd run into that in a hard-science class. This was more a minor "wow, so it really happens, and I'm surprised and a bit disappointed to see it from this professor" moment.

This sort of practice isn't reserved just for athletes. I'm in the Navy ROTC unit, and even though I'm a Political Science major, the Navy requires PHYS 2305 and 2306. They have a deal worked with the Physics department where they try and put all the Navy non-engineers in the same class and its supposedly dumbed down a bit/ curved somewhat kindly.

Turns out # chopping wood did mean we got a commitment per 247!!

Keihn?

"Go Hokies!" - Thomas Jefferson
@HaydenDubya

Appears to be 2015 DB Ashton White per his Twitter

"And loud, listen for yourself..." - Ron Franklin

Very similar to what Sumlin does at Texas A&M when they get a recruit. He tweets #yessir every time they get a commit. Gotta love the energy that he's brought to college station and the renewed atmosphere there. Even though he is a head coach and Moorehead is a position coach, I still see the same type of thing going on here. Love it! Lets go Hokies! Good start to 2015!

I was going to post this about the #choppingwood thing but was way too drunk so just decided to wait until the news broke.
Does anybody actually study on reading day? Ha

VT '15

Every time I hear "Choppin Wood" and "Football" I think about this story.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?id=1635118

Apparently the Jags punter retired and persued a second career catching child predators for NBC news.

The Dude Abides

CH