Honestly my school did the math. It's division 3 non scholarship, this means people play sports for fun. Almost none play pro. Sports are there as an enrichment for the school and student, they don't earn a direct profit for the school, they're actually a loss leader the same as other student activities. But they realized that if you did extra activities in college you were 70% more likely to donate as alumni. Statistically everyone who went to the school was successful and made decent money. They realized you did 50% less activities in college than you did in HS. Most kids have one or two activities max in HS unless you count sports. I was a 2 sport athlete, ran pep rallies for student council and started the TV station, so four. I did 3 activities in college, football, TV station, and fraternity.

So I'm a school that half the applicants are valedictorians and stuco presidents, how do you decide who to bring in: you go for breadth and variety. If you were an outstanding athlete then the team would do better and everyone had a better time and more money. Also it's another bullet point to toss on the list on the brochures: we made the playoffs in X, Y, Z, Q, S, T. We have 31 national championships. Most of the sports teams there are above average. They like to be in consideration for the former Sears Trophy, now Directors' Cup, the trophy for the best overall athletics program, aka the most national championships across ALL sports in a season.

Why admissions officer access? Simple, there are 5k undergrad, about 20 admissions officers and around 400 incoming athletes across all sports. That means 2k+ applicants. With around 32k applications a year for the school more than enough to warrant a dedicated officer. However I believe they were shared with the academic scholarship intake queue as well. Why did the athletic department have an former admissions officer? Because admissions officer is an entry point job at a lot of schools. This person had been a mid level officer and then went into administration at the athletic department.

Surprising or not there were a very large number of very smart kids in athletics there. One soccer player was a Rhodes scholar. One season we had 2 burger King academic all Americans on our football team, they give out one a week across all college sports. My year in football alone graduated 4 doctor's who all had near 4.0 in engineering undergrad which had a 2.8 average.

Athletics didn't allow me to skate by. It did give me a professor who was in my court, the coach. Like having a second parent. Like your advisor is SUPPOSED to be but usually isn't. That was the only real advantage once in school. I personally did the normal college load, and did around 3600 hours of sports on top of it as did the other athletes. I also graduated with a computer science degree. My grades were actually better in season because I had negative free time. All I did was school and sports.

This isn't your Hollywood movie D1 athletic department. I actually had several teachers try and fail me for playing sports. And several very supportive teachers It's a nerdy school. One teacher tried to fail 3 of the volleyball players because they would miss their Saturday final because they were traveling for the national championship instead of just moving the exam 1 day.

The vast majority of schools are not Division 1 sports. The reason I heard from other schools on my admissions was I applied to a d3 school, a d2 school, and a several D1 schools. Two of the D1 schools told me not to waste my time playing college D1 ball, I wasn't big enough. Northwestern told me the same and told me that they'd had one person even do football and graduate from engineering in the last 30 years. They were kind enough to meet with me in person as I was at an academic summer camp there. They were more like 6k hours in sports. I was grateful for that frank advice, even though I would have had the experience of beating notre dame at notre dame and going to the rose bowl the next season (and very bad seasons thereafter) if I had gone.

But thank you for assuming I got through college by being a mediocre football player.