Dobbs named one of 14 smartest college players

#76
#76
Volosaurus rex said:
Given the poor grasp of history with which kids typically emerge from high school today, it would not surprise me to see that kind of performance in Western Civ by contemporary freshmen. In your era, however, the Liberal Arts were still considered to be the cornerstone of a college education. Did that article suggest, perhaps, that such poor performance in Western Civ was attributable to its status as a general studies requirement, one for which comparatively few students had an interest in the subject material?
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Probably, but a lot of it was that we had a tremendous amount of material to cover between classes. When you first arrive on campus, and are faced with numerous distractions, and haven't ever really had to study very hard, it takes an acclimation period, and some discipline. Otherwise, you go home .
 
#77
#77
1972 Grad said:
I believe that my years on The Hill were some of the best ever for U.T. football in the last 60 years. The Florida game after Dickey's departure was memorable for sure, but the 2 Penn State games were way up there for me. Beating Alabama became normal during those few years.

I attended every home game in 67,8,9,70 and 71 while a student. We had one tie which felt like a win ( 17-17 against Georgia in 68), and one loss against Auburn 10-9 in 71 I think. We won every game in Neyland except those 2, and I count one as a win because we scored as time ran out, and got a 2 point conversion, after trailing 17-9.

I remember all the bowl games, but the only one that I attended was the 1971 Sugar. I think it was at the end of the 70 season.
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That '68 Georgia game was John Ward's first as the "Voice of the Vols." The 34-13 rout of Air Force in the '71 Sugar Bowl certainly was a delightful memory. We reeled off 24 unanswered points on four successive possessions in the first quarter before that dog disrupted play on the field for more than ten minutes. We cooled off appreciably after the resumption of play.
 
#79
#79
MSCE09 said:
That seems a little over the top. He was a freshman. Overall freshman year in engineering isn't that hard if you went to a decent high school that prepared you for college level calculus and chemistry. Not saying he isn't a smart kid, but anointing him a genius seems a big leap.
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Your a hater
 
#80
#80
1972 Grad said:
I started as a Math major, and went through Calculus I and II, and Diff Equations fairly routinely. When I got into Math Theory, I decided that a change in major to Economics would be my best chance to actually graduate.
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Lol, this almost mirrored my situation. I switched to Finance
 
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#81
#81
If I may go the opposite end of the spectrum to ktown king just for the hellofit, how many black people would think Dobbs "acted too white" or sold out because he is smart and has his head on straight?
As a matter of fact, in the next racial draft, I would like to take Dobbs if we can. Halle Berry is first. Maybe Dobbs in the 2nd round. They can have Riley.
 
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#83
#83
Spartacavolus said:
If I may go the opposite end of the spectrum to ktown king just for the hellofit, how many black people would think Dobbs "acted too white" or sold out because he is smart and has his head on straight?
As a matter of fact, in the next racial draft, I would like to take Dobbs if we can. Halle Berry is first. Maybe Dobbs in the 2nd round. They can have Riley.
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Nice Chappelle Show reference.
 
#84
#84
Honors engineering classes making good grades while doing D1 football. I would say he is probably one of the smartest college athletes. Anybody who has taken engineering courses should know the large amount of time it requires to succeed in it. I saw Dobbs and his parents at IHOP one day and encouraged him to stick through engineering, and both he and his parents assured he would. Why VOL fans are belittling his achievements are beyond me.

-Signed a UT BME graduate
 
#85
#85
vollygirl said:
I see. (Sorry it took me so long to respond, I've been traveling all day.)

I'm looking at this from a different perspective I guess. He isn't taking typical student-athlete underclassman courses (and that's what this is really about, student-athletes who have started in one or more games). I also disagree with your point that intelligence can only be measured once you reach a certain mark. I think Dobbs has proven his intelligence by starting four games for the University of Tennessee, as a freshman, while excelling in the classroom taking courses that are atypical of an average student-athlete schedule. The fact he is an underclassman is what earns him a spot on this list, in my opinion.

But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. This was one writers' opinion. It is sad though (and this isn't directed at you), that "Tennessee fans" use it as an opportunity to knock a player.
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All good points. You make a very strong case for Dobbs to be included in spite of the fact that he's an underclassman (or because of it, from your perspective). I do want to clarify that my point is not that you can't measure intelligence until a certain mark is reached. The only thing I was trying to say with the 2015 starting QB analogy is that it's premature, but I should have considered what else could be pulled from it. The point I'm trying to make is that individuals should have to reach similar marks to be considered comparable. A better analogy would be comparing someone's Junior Varsity performance to someone else's Varsity performance. Since no standardized measure of intelligence was used to compile the list (or none was cited at least), my opinion that junior/senior level classes are much more difficult than freshman/sophomore level classes (formed by personal experience) leads me to the conclusion that they're comparing apples to oranges by including underclassmen. I have to admit that I really didn't expect that view to be contested, but that's why we discuss I guess. Different experiences and different points of view. I do appreciate your thoughtful responses. Including underclassmen on the list seems much less far-fetched to me now.
 
#86
#86
Spartacavolus said:
If I may go the opposite end of the spectrum to ktown king just for the hellofit, how many black people would think Dobbs "acted too white" or sold out because he is smart and has his head on straight?
As a matter of fact, in the next racial draft, I would like to take Dobbs if we can. Halle Berry is first. Maybe Dobbs in the 2nd round. They can have Riley.
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Although I realize that pointing this out may be frowned upon, there was a sociologist, whose name I do not recall, that documented precisely the attitude you referenced, i.e. an "anti-achievement" ethic among inner-city blacks wherein academic excellence was viewed negatively as a departure from the ethnic solidarity of African-Americans. More recently, John H. McWhorter, a black 34-year-old University of California-Berkeley linguistics professor, has addressed many of the same themes in his book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. McWhorter contends that "African Americans undermine their own progress by subscribing to 'a cult of victimology' that leads them to loaf through school, mistake minor inconveniences for crippling racism and embrace an anti-intellectual culture that frowns on serious scholarship."

The fact that "African American students . . . earn the lowest grades and test scores at every level from elementary school through law school," according to McWhorter, "is not merely confined to those isolated in rural areas or poor inner-city communities." He also contends that "the main problem African Americans face in school and elsewhere is the set of values they choose to embrace as authentic. Too many blacks dismiss school achievement as a 'white thing,' he says, establishing a predictable pattern they follow later in life by accepting distorted notions of 'cultural blackness' that cast racism as an immutable fact and romanticize ghetto life. . . . [If the problem isn't attitude,] why else would many new immigrants do well in the very same inner-city schools, staffed with the very same teachers that serve so many black students? And if the nation's school curricula are grounded in a culture irrelevant to blacks, he says, that culture is downright foreign to Indian, Korean or Chinese students who, by and large, do well in school" (Race Matters - John McWhorter Links Low Achievement to Black Culture).

If these attitudes are as endemic as McWhorter contends, Josh deserves even more credit for his academic success to date and the curriculum he has chosen as his major. If memory serves me correctly, Josh's parents are well-educated, so he may have been inculcated with a fundamentally greater appreciation for academic work than many of his peers.
 
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#87
#87
Spartacavolus said:
If I may go the opposite end of the spectrum to ktown king just for the hellofit, how many black people would think Dobbs "acted too white" or sold out because he is smart and has his head on straight?
As a matter of fact, in the next racial draft, I would like to take Dobbs if we can. Halle Berry is first. Maybe Dobbs in the 2nd round. They can have Riley.
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Why are you bringing me up? No Black person thinks someone doing the right thing is "acting White". This isn't a sitcom or tv show. Black people don't really think like that.
 
#88
#88
k-town_king said:
Why are you bringing me up? No Black person thinks someone doing the right thing is "acting White". This isn't a sitcom or tv show. Black people don't really think like that.
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Like I posted before, at least I can see them extremes in various directions, rather than just one.
That was the point of my post in the first place.
 
#90
#90
youngcraig1 said:
Lol, this almost mirrored my situation. I switched to Finance
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Another thing that woke me up and slapped me in the face was when I was sitting in a Math Theory course, absolutely lost, with my mind wandering, and I turned and looked around the room at the other 30 or so people in the class. I saw several folks from India, several from China, and several white geeks with white socks and slide rules hanging from their belts, and they carried their books like a girl. I didn't look like any of them.

I said to myself , silently in my head of course, if you ever get through this, do you really want to spend the rest of your life working with these f...kers? I get back to the dorm, get out my catalog, and start looking for something else to do with my life. The people that I knew in the College of Business at least knew how to have a good time. So, Economics it was.
 
#91
#91
Volosaurus rex said:
Although I realize that pointing this out may be frowned upon, there was a sociologist, whose name I do not recall, that documented precisely the attitude you referenced, i.e. an "anti-achievement" ethic among inner-city blacks wherein academic excellence was viewed negatively as a departure from the ethnic solidarity of African-Americans. More recently, John H. McWhorter, a black 34-year-old University of California-Berkeley linguistics professor, has addressed many of the same themes in his book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. McWhorter contends that "African Americans undermine their own progress by subscribing to 'a cult of victimology' that leads them to loaf through school, mistake minor inconveniences for crippling racism and embrace an anti-intellectual culture that frowns on serious scholarship."

The fact that "African American students . . . earn the lowest grades and test scores at every level from elementary school through law school," according to McWhorter, "is not merely confined to those isolated in rural areas or poor inner-city communities." He also contends that "the main problem African Americans face in school and elsewhere is the set of values they choose to embrace as authentic. Too many blacks dismiss school achievement as a 'white thing,' he says, establishing a predictable pattern they follow later in life by accepting distorted notions of 'cultural blackness' that cast racism as an immutable fact and romanticize ghetto life. . . . [If the problem isn't attitude,] why else would many new immigrants do well in the very same inner-city schools, staffed with the very same teachers that serve so many black students? And if the nation's school curricula are grounded in a culture irrelevant to blacks, he says, that culture is downright foreign to Indian, Korean or Chinese students who, by and large, do well in school" (Race Matters - John McWhorter Links Low Achievement to Black Culture).

If these attitudes are as endemic as McWhorter contends, Josh deserves even more credit for his academic success to date and the curriculum he has chosen as his major. If memory serves me correctly, Josh's parents are well-educated, so he may have been inculcated with a fundamentally greater appreciation for academic work than many of his peers.
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Nailed it. It's truly terrible.
 
#92
#92
Quaint88 said:
To summarize my point, I think it's premature to put an underclassman on this list because he hasn't reached the tougher classes in his major yet. Wow, I couldn't imagine taking a 3000 level class as a freshman. I managed to take on too much my first semester in a different way. I had to get special permission to take 19 hours. At the time I signed up, I didn't understand why. After getting home from class around 4pm each day and working on homework until after 11 every night for a few weeks, it made perfect sense.
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Dobbs must be smarter than you give him credit for, those 3000 level classes are something big considering the highest I know of are 300 and 400....
 
#93
#93
VFLCodyGBO said:
Dobbs must be smarter than you give him credit for, those 3000 level classes are something big considering the highest I know of are 300 and 400....
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Yeah, I should've said junior/senior level. I didn't realize the four digit course numbers at ETSU were that unusual.
 
#94
#94
Quaint88 said:
To summarize my point, I think it's premature to put an underclassman on this list because he hasn't reached the tougher classes in his major yet. Wow, I couldn't imagine taking a 3000 level class as a freshman. I managed to take on too much my first semester in a different way. I had to get special permission to take 19 hours. At the time I signed up, I didn't understand why. After getting home from class around 4pm each day and working on homework until after 11 every night for a few weeks, it made perfect sense.
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Why not just say "way to go Dobbs!!!"?
 
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#96
#96
1972 Grad said:
I started as a Math major, and went through Calculus I and II, and Diff Equations fairly routinely. When I got into Math Theory, I decided that a change in major to Economics would be my best chance to actually graduate.
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I had a similar route to my Economics degree.
 
#97
#97
thebjd said:
Why not just say "way to go Dobbs!!!"?
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Vol Nation lessons I learned in this thread:
  1. If my opinion undermines an accomplishment of a Vol, I will keep it to myself. It won't be looked upon kindly.
  2. If someone more experienced on VN thinks someone is a hater, they probably are (Good call, WoodsmanVol).
 
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