OT: C average for admission to Cal as an athlete.

OT because this seems to be about the cashflow sports, but I'd wonder about pressure on other sports to bring the average up.

Cal's shockingly low athletic admission standards - SFGate

Star athletes getting special treatment, shocking.
I guess my son should have been a football player instead of a top student if he really wanted to go to Cal.
though in the overall scheme of things this probably applies mostly to Football and Basketball as the article mentions so you are talking about what 100 or so potential students out of roughly 25,000 undergraduates.

No big surprise, Stanford has been known to do the same thing for athletes. Plus, if you graduate from any California JC you're automatically admitted to a UC school. Not necessarily Berkeley or UCLA for us mere mortals, but several football players who couldn't make the cut at other schools end up at Cal as a JC transfer.

I was that guy - an athlete admitted to an extremely rigorous and selective universtiy because of my sport. My SATs were so low as to give my dorm-mates heart palpitations. I think they thought I was either putting them on or I was some sort of mythical creature who got admitted to a top university with incredibly low boards - the kind of person academics may hear about, but don't think they'd ever encounter in the wild.

In the end, it turned out to be a great experience. I have an accomplishment through my degree which can never be taken away. However - I will say that I struggled. My first two years were incredibly difficult as I struggled to compete in introductory "weed out" classes which were graded on the curve. The plight of the student athlete and the university's role is incredibly complicated - I really can see if from all sides - in the end I care about the student.

My biggest issue is missed classroom time. We need to figure out a way in which a highly motivated student athlete CAN succeed - with the resources and classroom instruction to be able to do so. The athletic advisor's comment in the article was pretty arrogant - yes of course these guys are focused on their sport; they're left with very little time to do anything else. It's hard to attend your Friday afternoon chem lab when you're 1000 miles away. My wish for the future is that universities will use all of the changes we're seeing in technology to enable athletes to attend lectures remotely so that academics and athletics can work in tandem to the benefit of everyone involved.

Indy, great perspective and I'm glad it worked out for you.
In addition, one of the things about Cal that my friends point out is that resources and support are scarce to non-existent, so you're on your own, while other uni's with ample resources can help you succeed regardless of how you got in.