Shaun Livingston Quotes

My high school class was the first one to know, during the college recruiting process, to know there was the option to play professional basketball, to know that the WNBA was there, and to know I better pick a school that is going to help me get to the next level.

You see far more swings and misses on can't-miss football recruits than basketball blue chips.

I'm really considering all the schools. It's not fair for me to only look at certain... programs just because they had players that are at my stature.

I had a coach when I was getting recruited say maybe you should play basketball at a Division III level, because you're not good enough to play football in college.

Washington State was a tough recruiting spot.

Coming out of high school, however, I wasn't a decorated recruit. As a result, I found myself one month from signing day with only two scholarship offers and they were from the Mid-American Conference.

I was very close to playing at an Ivy League School. The Division I schools, when a coach would come visit all he would talk about was my size.

There's no comparison between Division I and Division II. The reason they have Division II is for the guys who can't make it at Division I. That's fine. They need to have something to feel good about themselves. Those guys have to have something to do with their lives.

I chose Tennessee because I thought they'd give me an opportunity to play.

Once you start worrying about a national football championship, then you begin to worry about getting the quality of athlete, and the numbers needed, to win a national championship. And that worry leads to pressure to compromise academic standards to admit those athletes.

When I was in university, my dream was to be a coach, like a high school track coach. Not to teach.

I had only played five games in my senior year in high school. I was not large enough. Hell, when I graduated, I was about five foot four and weighed 120 pounds. I didn't go with the Dodgers until spring training of 1940 and I weighed all of 155 pounds soaking wet.

So, I got a lot of recruitment letters from track.

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

I ran track in high school very competitively, and then ran it D-1 at Boston University. I ran there on an athletic scholarship and chose BU because they had both a good track program and an arts program.

I didn't get an athletics scholarship at a major school.

The University of Notre Dame does not redshirt, and I endorse that policy completely. I am very much in favor of redshirting, but not at Notre Dame. But there's no doubt about it. It puts us at a huge disadvantage.

I was a defensive lineman coming out of high school who was considered amongst the top... maybe the top six guys, top five guys, and wanted to prove to my team that I was going to be a top guy going into college.

That's the same in college. It's the same in high school. Kids are getting bigger, stronger, faster, more into the weightlifting, more into nutrition, more into size.

A lot of people talk about the one-and-done attitude of college athletes, but if you look at the University of Kentucky, we do build winners.

My life, even as a college student, has all been through the NCAA, and I'm telling you there's so much good that comes out of it.

It's a real strength for me that I've never minded the training process. It's something I enjoy. I really like being in the gym or, certainly, on the field.

Having a father as a football and a baseball coach, I grew up around college baseball players, college football players, like, I just knew sports my whole life.

High school, going into my junior year, I kind of had the idea I was going to be the starting running back. I was a little smaller, so I decided to gain weight and try to get faster. I wasn't a fan of the weight room. I thought just the God-given talent would take you where you needed to go. Now I understand that you need hard work.