Students are accustomed to seeing LSU football players on the green of Tiger Stadium, but there’s another place to catch them together – Dodson Auditorium.
Junior defensive end Sam Montgomery is there every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning for his accounting class, where he’s joined by a host of other Tigers. They’re just a few of the many student-athletes who share a major.
For Montgomery, that major is sports administration. He’s one of 26 football players in the program, which draws swarms of athletes from all sports.
But the highest concentration of sports administration majors hails from Alex Box Stadium.
Of the 34 players on the LSU baseball team, 21 are majoring in sports administration, part of the College of Education’s Department of Kinesiology. That’s nearly 62 percent of the team, according to the 2012 LSU baseball roster.
Other teams with a significant number of sports administration majors include men’s tennis with 60 percent and softball with 35 percent.
For Montgomery, choosing sports administration was, ironically, a way to stand out from traditional athletes majoring in general studies.
“I wanted to get a degree in something else besides the basics, like general studies,” Montgomery said. “I want to be different from just your average athlete.”
Dorothy Jacobsen, undergraduate sports administration coordinator, said sports administration is a relatively new program, implemented in 2009. Jacobsen said the major was created in response to the abundance of jobs in the sports field.
The program currently boasts an enrollment of 338 students, according to the Office of Budget and Planning. Of those students, 85 are student-athletes, meaning about 25 percent of sports administration majors are student-athletes.
Montgomery is joined in sports administration by his teammates, freshman punter Brad Wing and sophomore defensive end Barkevious Mingo.
“Parents always want their kids to be a lawyer or doctor,” Mingo said. “I just want to major in something that I enjoy.”
 
Wing said he chose the program with help from an academic counselor.
“In Australia, not a lot of people end up going to college,” Wing said. “When I came to LSU, my adviser suggested a few options. Sports administration sounded the most interesting.”
Seeing a large population of athletes in the same field of study isn’t a rarity. Researchers have examined the phenomenon of collegiate athletes “clustering” in certain majors for years. 
In a November 2008 report by USA Today, 235 clusters were found among a sample group of 654 teams. The report defines a cluster as being 25 percent of athletes for larger teams and 33 percent for smaller teams congregating in the same major.
LSU has four athletic teams that meet or exceed the cluster trend.
Critics of clustering attribute the trend to heightened graduation-rate standards implemented by the NCAA in 2003, according to the USA Today report. The report said some see it as a way to cut academic corners to help athletes stay eligible to play while working toward a degree.
Student-athletes at LSU say that’s debatable.
Roger Cooke, history junior and distance runner, said the difficulty of a major is ultimately decided by the athlete.
“With any degree, you have to put in some work to make it count,” Cooke said. “Of course, some people just barely meet the minimum requirements.”
Distance runner and marketing sophomore Michelle Mobley said clustering may occur – whether purposefully or not – because many athletes have school schedules that conflict with the demands of their sport, limiting the number of academic options.
“Lots of people just major in something that they like,” Mobley said. “But I think some athletes pick easier majors because doing something like architecture wouldn’t fit their schedule. You have to spend a bunch of hours in lab every week on top of homework and practice.”
Though particular majors may be more flexible or enticing to athletes, Jacobsen stressed it doesn’t mean those courses are any easier.
“The major is just as difficult as any other offered at the University,” Jacobsen said. “I have had students go on to graduate school and even law school. We have had students take internships all across the country.”
To determine a school’s compliance with academic regulations, the NCAA considers a statistic called the Academic Progress Rate. The highest possible score is 1,000, based on the eligibility, retention and graduation of each student athlete on scholarship.
Teams that score below 925 on their four-year rate and have a student leave school because they are academically ineligible can lose up to 10 percent of their scholarships through penalties.
The Daily Reveille reported in May 2010 that graduation rates of football players have risen every year since 2005. LSU football’s Academic Progress Rate was 923 in 2005 and jumped to 960 in 2009. That number puts the University at No. 4 in the Southeastern Conference.
The University’s Department of Sports Information also reported in October 2011 that the University’s Graduation Success Rate, developed to more accurately assess the academic success of student-athletes, has continually increased among football players.
“LSU football’s score of 77 is well above the national mark of 67 for all Football Bowl Subdivision schools. The NCAA began calculating the [Graduation Success Rate] in 2006, and the LSU football program has shown improvement with each year’s report, going from 51 in 2006 and 2007 to 54 in 2008, 60 in 2009 and 67 in 2010,” according to the report.
The report is based on the entering classes from the fall semester of 2001 to the spring semester of 2005.
But others, like United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, deny that clustering and graduation rates are linked.
“When folks take this seriously and have built this as part of their institutional culture and are committed to doing it, really good things happen for student-athletes,” Duncan said in a recent teleconference. “If folks want to play around the margins and not take this seriously, we can address that. When the institution is committed to academic success, not just athletic success, great things happen for their student-athletes.”
 
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Contact Joshua Bergeron at [email protected]