Nebraska has a pretty good tradition of Academic All Americans. I'd like to see the coaching staff do more to support/enforce this. So they didn't know this was happening all semester long, that's one big ugly black eye to Coach Riley in my opinion. It's in the football teams best interest to be monitoring these things. Not everyone requires this level of oversight, but some do, and it's part of a person's development. This actually changes my perception of Mike in a negative way. I thought we had people on staff specifically for managing these things.
Why do you think Riley didn't know about it? I haven't seen anything from the university that says, we are as shocked as the rest of you.
Gerry isn't a 18 year old freshman, away from home for the first time.
He knew he needed to pass classes to be eligible and he simply didn't go to class. You can't get 0.0 without a huge amount of effort.
As I stated before, I wish Riley would have dismissed him from the team when it became apparent he wasn't going to class and had no intention on going to class. With that said, if there are no rules in place concerning class attendance, you can't make them up halfway through the season, simply because you may have other players, not attending class but still "earning" a passing grade. He may have found himself short quite a few players.
I don't get that this is some sort of a black eye on anyone but the player. There are 120-130 players on this football team, yet only 2 failed to meet the minimum standard and both of those players have been in the program for 3 years.