We’ve all been there.

There’s a debate in section, and someone throws out an argument or a comment that has so little to do with the topic at hand that you are rendered unable to speak for a series of minutes, hours or even days.

After a brief pause, the section leader always chimes in, desperately searching for a shred of intellectual value to pull from that worthless scrap heap.

That’s one way to inform someone that he or she has missed the point.

Here’s another.

In a column published in the Cornell Daily Sun, staff writer Tim Kuhls broached an interesting topic of Ivy debate—athletic scholarships—and proceeded to make himself look like an idiot.

There are myriad angles from which to attack this ponderous dilemma.

Should schools which have already devoted 40 to 45 spots to high profile men’s sports—football, basketball and hockey—attempt to maximize the level of student-athlete they can attract by offering compensation that is competitive with the rest of the marketplace?

Is it right to implicitly value athletics more than other extracurricular activities by offering scholarships in the former arena and not the latter?

How should the scholarships be allocated and where should they stop? How does Title IX play into these considerations?

The good columnist from the Sun addresses none of these issues. His fresh, new analysis of the athletic scholarship discussion might best be summed up as he so eloquently put it, “Because we don’t admit retards at my school. The Ivy League means one thing and that’s serious academic business, baby.”

No effort will be made here to rehash all of his 1,038 word diatribe—please visit the Daily Sun’s website for the full masterpiece. Rather, I’d like to follow what I consider to be the worst published argument against athletic scholarships that I have ever seen.

First, Kuhls states that he stands proud because his school “still adheres to the ideals of the true student-athlete.” (Let’s leave aside the fact that, according to factors we’ll discuss later, Cornell has the weakest admissions standards of all the league’s schools.) He goes on to imagine a hypothetical Ivy League—under the athletic scholarship policy—in which the member institutions would admit a recruit “with an SAT score of 400 or an ACT score of nine, so long as their high school GPA in 14 core subjects is above a 3.55.”

No mention of the Academic Index floor—a lower-bound cutoff that prevents students with anything lower than approximately an 1100 to 1150 on the SATs from even being considered—and no discussion of the Ivy League’s AI banding policy, which sets the percentage of a school’s 30 recruits that must fit into different ranges of SAT scores and GPA levels—the components of the AI.

If Kuhls had mentioned these things, he’d realize that his proposition that “dumber athletes would bring down the average SAT score” is badly misinformed, precisely because the AI banding prohibits that from happening.