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Comment by daveFNbuck | Hacker News Reader

That probably has a lot to do with it. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm over the years if it isn't being returned. I think the lack of passion from the students is more about the voluntary nature of the football team than anything inherent to the jocks.

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The rewards are different, too. There is no level of mathematical achievement that will get the kind of broad (but typically local) social status and public approval of being a starting high school quarterback. Math just doesn't tap into anything near as easy and primal.

That's true, but I've seen years where an enthusiastic professor gets a packed room for a normally undersubscribed elective course like computational complexity theory or advanced algorithms.

True, but there's a heavy selection going on there. A packed complexity class might mean 50? enthusiastic undergrads out of several hundred math/cs students at a university.

A dedicated and charismatic professor might be instrumental in turning an interested computer science student into a raging algorithmist (indeed, I actually think a lot of computer science grad students study what they study because somebody appropriately passionate introduced it to them), but converting a just-here-for-the-requirement high schooler is a different story.

The football team also has a heavy selection bias.

Personally, I got into CS because there was a required intro class at my undergrad. A dedicated and charismatic professor noticed my aptitude and encouraged me to take the next course and consider a CS major. This could easily have happened in high school if my high school had a required CS course.

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