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LJ: Rumors are flying about highly ranked Fayetteville recruit Justin Dixon as football season quickly approaches, but one certainty is that Dixon will not be attending the University of North Carolina (UNC) this fall.
After committing to UNC approximately one year ago, Dixon failed to meet minimum academic requirements outlined in Proposition 48 (Prop 48) by the NCAA, and he will not be enrolled at UNC.
The NCAA passed Prop 48 in 1983 to require athletes to take their high school education seriously if they wanted to play Division I athletics (LINK). Prop 48 requires a minimum SAT score of 700, or an ACT score of 17, and a minimum GPA of 2.0 in at least 11 courses in core classes.
Non-qualifiers of Prop 48, as is Dixon, are not allowed to receive athletic scholarships and must sit out one athletic year while losing that year of eligibility. Not an easy road to take for a star athlete, and most BCS conferences, from the ACC to the SEC, will not accept non-qualifiers.
The NCAA allows the athlete to participate in athletic activities for 14 days while they review their transcript. If Dixon remains unqualified, pays his own way, and does not participate in practice there should be no questioning the athlete's move. BUT...if Dixon is somehow miraculously qualified in these two weeks and failing to do so for over a year - there should be some investigation into this process.
ECU has been campaigning (literally) with NC State lawmakers to require in-state schools to play them in athletic competition. This insures ECU greater media coverage and national recognition, which drives up applications and enrollment at ECU and positively promotes more impassioned rivalries within the state of NC.
It does bring the integrity of these campaigned games into question, when ECU is taking advantage of "grey area" recruiting loopholes for non-qualifiers that large BCS conferences are not allowed to employ.
Skip Holtz has done a great job at ECU recruiting, coaching, and promoting its program, but will ECU be able to compete in big conference competition without these recruiting loopholes? Will Dixon miraculously see playing time at ECU this year? Time will answer these questions and Dixon's situation, as a prime example, will be something to watch.
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Despite the yammering from the BCS that it was put in place to crown a national champion, it is a system designed to funnel all the money and top recruits to six conferences, the ACC being one of the "big 6". By high jacking the national title game away from 60 or so "non-bcs" schools gives a built in recruiting advantage to the BCS conference schools, which UNC is one. So for all your whinning about ECU having some sort of recruiting edge over all the money grabbing and ESPN hyping that UNC and the ACC gets is just sour grapes on your part. I'm sure if ECU ever finds itself in a BCS conference they will more than be happy to oblidge by its rules.
ReplyDeleteThis is the only ECU argument that makes sense: "We have to go outside the regulations - to keep up."
ReplyDeleteI understand this logic - but the facts are this one recruit was even denied admittance to Hargrave. So basically, ECU is admitting a student that was a non-qualifier for Prop 48 but was also denied to a prep school.
If the kid can turn it around and wait out his mandatory year - more power to him. He's got a long way to go...