Southern athletes turn in banner semester, helping polish image. 'If you sum it up, it means everything.'

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- As far as Roman Banks and Trayvean Scott are concerned, Southern’s student-athletes — as a collective group — earned a championship in the fall semester.

Southern’s 290 athletes achieved a cumulative 3.05 grade point average in the fall semester, a number that was bolstered by more than half of the total athletes at Southern turning in a 3.0 or better GPA. More than 40 percent landed on the honor roll.

“In a word, if you sum it up, it means everything,” said Scott, Southern’s executive associate athletic director. “From a recruiting standpoint, from a standpoint of being competitive, from a standpoint of being viable as a member of a Division I institution, it means everything.”

Said Banks, Southern’s athletic director, “Those are championship numbers. We like the direction we are heading in. It put us back in the game.”

This is the most notable sign that Southern is about to pull out of the academic mire in which it has been languishing for the last several years.

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