Quincy Guerrier is a crucial piece to the puzzle for Illinois during what is his fifth year of college basketball. The 6-foot-8 senior is the team’s leading rebounder and fourth-leading scorer.
If the No. 10-ranked Fighting Illini are going to make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament, Guerrier will need to continue his dominance in the paint and knock down open looks. And while academics are part of the student-athlete experience, his degree is already behind him so the focus is on hoops.
Guerrier graduated from the University of Oregon in 2023, after spending two years at Syracuse, with a degree that feels like cheating— in a non-negative way. It was brought to my attention on a Big Ten Network broadcast earlier this week.
Now, before we go any further, this is not a knock to Guerrier. He is a king!
I know plenty of college athletes who graduated with a general studies degree. I know absolutely nothing of the degree requirements in Eugene or what classes looked like at either of Guerrier’s former institutes of higher learning. I’m only able to speak from my own experience.
It feels like Quincy Guerrier found a loophole the system that allowed him to focus on college basketball!
He graduated from Oregon with a degree in French. However, Guerrier was born and raised in Montreal and French is his first language.
I was required to take two credits of a foreign language at the University of Mississippi and took Spanish. Many of my 100-level (even some 200-level) classmates struggled to understand that the “h” in “hola” is silent, for example. If someone who is fluent in Spanish took my classes, they would have been able to ace every exam without exerting any effort at all whatsoever.
Imagining Guerrier take a 100-level or 200-level French class while being fluent in French is hilarious.
With that being said, my esteemed colleague Clay Sauertieg made a good point! People who claim English as their first language often graduate with an English degree.
While his devil’s advocate stance first made me question the validity of an English degree, I thought long and hard about what he said. While it is true that English-speakers often major in English, like Guerrier majored in French, I again looked back at my own experience.
I took a few English courses in college, up to the 300-level. We studied more literature than language.
Does that make sense?
We did not study literature in my Spanish classes. We were taught how to speak the language.
If Guerrier’s French classes (at least during his freshman and sophomore years) at Syracuse and Oregon were anything like my Spanish classes at Ole Miss, he did not have to put in any work to obtain his degree. The 24-year-old essentially majored in college basketball. Brilliant.