News item! Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, the record executive who helped discovered him, are donating $70 million to USC, founding a degree program through which students learn how to meld marketing, business, and music-type stuff to learn how to become music moguls like Dre and Iovine. It’s going to be called the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation.
USC, Dr. Dre, and finding football success through hip-hop
USC recruiting just got a little bit more fun.
Elsa
We’ll choose to call it “Classes by Dre Classes.”
You’re probably thinking: what does this have to do with college football? Well, technically nothing. But if you think USC’s coaches aren’t going to take advantage of Dr. Dre having an academy for music moguldom on campus, you’re wrong.
There are NCAA rules that prevent coaches from leveraging celebrities to demonstrate the benefits of a college sports team. Air Force couldn’t even let their players teach Prince Harry how to play football, and there is a zero percent chance that the prospect of meeting Prince Harry would ever sway any college football recruit towards attending a service academy.
So having the possibility of selling kids on taking classes in or near Classes by Dre Classes? As close as football coaches will ever get, within NCAA rules.
USC (and its crosstown rival) already has a little bit of a history of finding rap-sports connections. In 2008, USC offered a point guard named Percy Miller -- aka, Lil Romeo, although I think he was just Romeo at that point -- but it wasn’t because he was good at basketball. It was because he was friends with eventual No. 9 draft pick DeMar DeRozan. Miller scored five points in two seasons. DeRozan averaged 13.9 a game and went pro.
UCLA currently has Justin Combs -- son of P. Diddy, seen here really excited at a Bruins football game -- on its roster as a cornerback. Both USC and UCLA have offered Cordell Broadus -- the son of Snoop Dogg, and a 6’2 wide receiver -- and both schools have interest, although no offers extended yet, to Naijiel Hale, the son of Nate Dogg.
It should also be noted that taking classes about hip-hop is awesome. My senior year at Northwestern, I took a class about hip-hop. We listened to a lot of music, discussed its social implications, analyzed lyrical content of songs. It was an awesome class, and it was me, my friend who makes mixtapes that I often take the chance to plug because they’re good, like, eight-ish other people, and four guys from the football team, one of whom got signed by the Bears last week.
It was awesome. I wrote a paper about “N.Y. State of Mind” by Nas, spit some bars for extra credit, and got an A. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only A I got in four years of college. (Note: I got my college transcript in the mail a few months after graduating and folded up real quick and threw it in a sock drawer, where it will remain forever.)
Point being: Dr. Dre-curated classes on rap business at USC is the best thing to happen to USC football since... well, it’s been a year or two, hasn’t it?
I think we can all agree that the real loser here is Michigan State.
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