Grambling Football Crisis

I think there's still a place for them, but it's definitely changing. Some of the more forward-thinking HBCUs are trying to reinvent themselves as second-tier, affordable state colleges. Alcorn State, for example, has two or three branch campuses scattered around Mississippi. There's also a push to recruit white students to some HBCUs by using minority scholarships -- in Mississippi, at least, white students are eligible for them at HBCUs since they're the minority of the student population; it's a useful tool for baseball coaches trying to save a scholarship.
Other HBCUs in rural areas or inner cities can serve as educational hubs for areas where minorities are the majority of the population.
By trying to fit those corners of the market, HBCUs will still primarily market themselves toward minorities and still have a place on the landscape.

 

I'm thinking because it's a smaller school like Grambling, which, instead of one of the big boys, it's more of an extra stick on the fire that's been going on the last couple of years (O'Bannon, video games, Johnny Football) rather than turning into a huge explosion in itself.

If something like this were to happen at a BCS school, all hell would break loose.

 

Oh, I absolutely agree. If this had happened even at a MAC or Sun Belt school, it'd be leading Sports Center. At the lowest of low-level FCS programs, even one as historically significant as Grambling, it barely rates an item on the crawl.
I'm just wondering if one of the pay-the-athletes crusaders will take up the cause.

 

I think this says more about the Clown College administration at Grambling than it does about how colleges at large treat their players.

 

Well, that too.

It's also illustrative on how times have changed in the past few decades, both culturally and in college football. In Robinson's time, or at least the first half of his career, the players would have been happy to ride a bus 15 hours because it would have meant that they wouldn't have to drive multiple cars to get to their game, and it meant that they actually had someone willing to play them.

Today, especially with how big-time college sports have gone and the change in racial culture, athletes have different expectations. They no longer have to fear teams refusing to play them, and they see other teams traveling in style and question why their team is stuck in the past.

 

HBCUs are the worst to cover. Just the worst.

And when I was skimming the page, I read the thread title as Gambling football crisis and I thought the line had another typo in it.

 

There is a need for them. White institutions began raiding these colleges back in the 60's for talent both academically and athletically. Funding for these schools has also dwindled and definitely not on par with what majority white institutions receive from state and national coffers. What has happened to Grambling and other HBCUs is disheartening.
I may be stereotyping here a bit but white kids attend HBCUs and there is very little in the way of racial problems. Ask any black kid who goes to a predominately white institution if he can say the same thing.

 

The HBCU's have also lost out on all the tv money now going to even 2nd tier D1 programs
which has enabled them to cast a wider net for athletes around the country. Besides money
it's exposure. In past I doubt as many would have even considered schools like Boise
or Fresno State but now they are on tv almost every week.

 

This is a grotesquely poor choices of words. Nobody "raided" the HBCUs for talent. Instead, what happened beginning in the 60s is that talented African American kids high school kids began getting more offers and opportunities from elsewhere, and thus simply began choosing other places.

The decline in talent at HBCUs is the result of good changes in American society, not bad ones.

 

Would agree, hence the possibility of HBCUs no longer needed.

 

I kinda like the usage of "raided." Granted, the athletes weren't dragged away at gunpoint from HBCUs. They also were weren't recruited to majority institutions because the Bear Bryants of the world thought it was just the right thing to do for society's sake.

 

SI.com story with some of the background behind the revolt.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-football/news/20131018/grambling-football/?sct=hp_t11_a2&eref=sihp