Not exactly. IIRC, we had under O'Leary an atrocious graduation rate, and under Gailey we were erroneously reporting academic progress resulting in several players being deemed eligible who in fact weren't (albeit inadvertently). Since then, and since CPJ, all that has been cleaned up and GT has a very good record of academic achievement among its football players. The academic situation is much improved over O'Leary and Gailey. And the SAT scores of football players are among the highest in the nation for a public institute of higher learning.
We definitely have higher SAT scores now than Oleary for sure and even Gailey. The academics are close to squeaky clean now. No argument at that level.
Under Gailey IIRC the academic issues were with the Hill and not the FB team per se. And more to the point, the guys who were NFL capable and NFL bound were generally not the issue. Calvin and his friends did OK in the classroom as I said.
I look at this as a pendulum and we have swung way hard to high academic requirements and few exceptions to admission. We are pretty close to squeaky clean on progress to graduation stats, etc. We also have several losing seasons in the past several seasons. That tells me we have room to loosen things up to some degree and allow a few more exceptions to the base recruiting standards. Get a few more playmakers in and then make sure the support is there to keep them eligible. I hate to say it this way but the goal of the FB team is not to have the highest SAT average of any public university (which we do) but to win games while graduating kids who come here.
I am not advocating wholesale abandonment of academic recruiting standards. But when your performance on the field is sub optimal and your performance in the class room is near perfect I would suggest some loosening on the academic side - while they watch and continue to monitor academic progress.