Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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MURPHY'S LAW DAN MURPHY for a national championship and have high graduation rates," head coach Brian Kelly said the following day. "I think we're going to validate that with the No. 1 [graduation rate]. You can do both." Maybe if we were all a little bit smarter, we would have seen this coming. The most talented jocks in the world are embracing their dorky side. NBA players with 20/20 vision started sporting the thickest glasses frames they could find last season. Then they argued about who was the first to turn himself from Stephon Urquell into Steve Urkel. Baseball players brag about the hours they spend locked into their video games. SportsCenter runs sci- ence experiments on the air, and stat geeks are taking over for ex-players as the top sports analysts. Suddenly knowing your BABIP (batting average on balls in play) is more important than your bench press. The Cardinal, led by an architectural design graduate (Andrew Luck) who is currently reconstructing the India- napolis Colts, started the brains-before- brawn movement in college football. It's only fitting that the revolution began in Silicon Valley, the first place where IQ scores determined social sta- tus. But they're no longer the only ones protecting their pockets from blitzing linebackers as well as exploding ink stains. "It's not easy, but it's not impossible either," said Rev. John Jenkins, Notre Dame's president, in a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. shock that football is becoming a more cerebral game. Gone are the days of lining up across from your opponent and smashing into one another until somebody falls down. College play- books are as thick as an organic chem- istry text, and the diagrams that lie inside are as difficult to decipher. Now that the smart guys are on top, the NCAA is making moves to keep them there. As of this March, basket- ball teams that fall below a certain line in the classroom won't be able to par- ticipate in the NCAA Tournament. In football if there aren't enough six-win teams to fill all 37 bowl games during the postseason, the 5-7 teams with top tier academic progress rating will get first dibs starting this year. Power begets power, and the often- lopsided battle is slowly slipping away from the jocks. Welcome to the nerd world order. ✦ Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached at dmurphy@blueandgold.com their football players. No. 8 Stanford graduates 90 percent. Northwestern, the only school tied with Notre Dame at 97 percent, is 8-3 this season and a few heartbreaks from being in conten- tion for a Rose Bowl spot. Vanderbilt has been getting wedgies from its SEC mates for years. This season the Com- modores are 7-4. Even the brainiacs at Duke — yes, Duke — are heading to a bowl game for the first time in 12 years and just the third time since 1961. It shouldn't come as too much of a The Irish graduate 97 percent of