DLG Consultant Group Mission Statement:

To assist athletic administrators, coaches and university staff in properly educating student athletes while promoting ethical behavior and self-awareness

Goals & Objectives:

• Increase retention and graduation rates of student athletes.
• Promote ethical behavior through successful navigation of moral dilemmas.
• Decrease negative off-field/court incidents.
• Address compliance and eligibility issues regarding student athletes.
• Collect real-time student-athlete-related quantitative and qualitative data.

Motivation for Formation of Consultant Group

Dr. Gragg has spent the past 20 years immersed in intercollegiate athletics at five different Football Bowl Subdivision institutions - Vanderbilt University, the University of Missouri, the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, and Eastern Michigan University.  As both a student-athlete and an athletic administrator, Dr. Gragg has become aware of the negative stereotypes used to describe and college student-athletes.  He is particularly concerned about the educational progress of football and men’s and women’s basketball student-athletes; the programs that produce the majority of revenue for all Division I institutions nationwide. 

Also, although numerous student-athletes are able to navigate the obstacles placed in their paths to obtain an athletic scholarship, many of them arrive on campus without the sense of moral focus necessary to make ethical decisions and choices.  More importantly, many of them may leave their respective campuses after exhausting their athletic eligibility without having gained any knowledge of self or a sense of consciousness regarding themselves, the university or the an community.  Thus, many of these student-athletes leave their institutions after four or five years no more prepared to survive in the real world than when they first arrived on campus, returning to their respective communities feeling exploited, harboring negative thoughts about their former coaches, athletic departments, and institutions. 

In order to help address these challenges, Dr. Gragg studied football student-athletes who achieved academic success in college to determine what factors helped them graduate.  Perhaps even more importantly, Gragg also sought to determine which factors negatively affected student-athletes who were not as successful academically and left their respective institutions without graduating.  This study serves as the foundation on which
DLG Consultant Group stands.