College football’s revenge of the nerds

David Cutcliffe wanted to illustrate a point using physics at a Duke football practice earlier this year.

“I said, ‘Just by chance, how many of you have taken physics?’” Cutcliffe said. “I think everyone on the team raised their hand. I don’t think that would happen many places.”

This season, those places where it would happen are using leverage and applying force with great effect. Check out the U.S. News & World Report’s annual best colleges rankings. Of the nine schools in the top 25 that have Division I-A football teams, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt and Cal have combined for a 24-7 record. Vanderbilt is 4-0, ranked No. 19 and the ESPN College GameDay crew is coming to Nashville this weekend for the Auburn game. Who would have thought that would happen when the school dissolved its athletics department five years ago?

Ga. Tech, which is ranked 35th in the U.S. News poll and 37th in the AP poll, will try to outthink and outmuscle Duke this weekend in a battle of 3-1 teams.

Only the University of Virginia and UCLA (combined 2-6) are ruining it for the smart kids.

Those with brains and brawn have a fan in Florida State coach Bobby Bowden.

“I pull for teams like Duke,” Bowden said. “The reason is because of the academic standards. It’s just good for people all over the country to see a team, a school that has the academic reputation Duke has to also be able to do it athletically.”

Wake Forest is 3-1 and ranked 25th. Its only loss came to Navy (3-2), another academically challenging school that’s having yet another good year.

“It’s been fun watching every Saturday as kind of the more academically rigorous schools, as you put it, do well,” said Ben Wooster, a tight end at Wake Forest from Suwanee and Greater Atlanta Christian. “We all kind of know where each other stands and what it takes to be successful in the classroom and on the field and the hard work that goes into that.”

Wooster has designs on medical school and volunteers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. With professors, he is researching the cardiac risk of football players, using some of his teammates as subjects.

They’re winning despite multiple obstacles. Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh said his recruiting pool is typically 100 to 150 players. Cutcliffe said Duke, Stanford and others are “like sharks feasting” on those players, not to mention any other interested schools.

Balancing football and books isn’t always easy. Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson said he sometimes excuses players from practice to go to study groups; Wooster said a teammate last year studied note cards between reps in the weight room.

Said Cutcliffe, “The challenges and demands by the faculty are just far beyond what I’ve been used to, to be real honest.”

But coaches don’t think this is all a coincidence. One benefit is a greater sense of security with the players that coaches do bring to campus.

“We get sharp young men, ones that you know are going to stay in school without much problem,” Johnson said. “You’re going to have them in your program and learn your system and usually become fifth-year seniors.”

Rice coach David Bailiff believes that, compared to the past, recruits are more interested in the quality of education, and not just the football. It makes an impression, then, when Rice’s three team doctors are ex-Owl football players and about a quarter of the team spends the summer interning with law firms.

The players may well be more coachable and self-motivated, also.

Wooster noted that playing against teams such as Duke and Navy, “you know they’re going to be pretty perfect, assignment-wise. They’re going to be in their books and they’re going to know the schemes you’re going to try to throw at them.”

Something seems to be working.

The elite schools, Bailiff said, “are recruiting young men that don’t just want to be doctors. They want to win championships.”

This year, it looks like it could happen.