Football "student athletes" coming to college just to PLAY

I was very disturbed to learn that less than half of all our football athletes at the University of Texas do not graduate. We have one of the worst gradutae rates in the entire NCAA. It really raises my eyebrows to the athletic department. It seem like they care about the athlete until the January of their senior year, than they say Goodbye. I've seen first hand of this happening. After the Longhorns went to the National Championship game of last year and lost, the next semester, numerous amounts of seniors were missing in action(from school). Dr. Todd put all of things in perspecitive that has me very dissapointed in the NCAA and the University of Texas. Our mission statement is to achieve "academic excellence", how our we achieving this if we have academic counselors, academic teachers, coaches, and most important the athletes who are doing the bare minium for the athletes just to PLAY? In my opinion the NCAA needs to increase the minium requirements for athletes to be able to compete. If that means the less talented are going to be benched...oh well. "Academic Excellence" comes first!