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Abstract
NCAA Division I FBS revenue-sport student-athletes, those participating in mens basketball and football, tend to have lower GPA averages than the general student body. Existing research findings support the conclusion that these students overall have strong athletic identities; but there is a scarcity of information that directly measures how this identity variable may quantitatively relate to their academic performance. This study is exploratory and quantitative, using a small sample of revenue athletes from one FBS university to begin hypothesizing about a possible, important mediating variable between athletic identity and academic performance: Intelligence. Findings of this study reveal a relationship between identity and intelligence for revenue athletes, with an equality found between the athletic variables (bodily-kinesthetic and spatial intelligence) and the academic variables (logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligence), yet statistically higher means for the athletic variables compared to their academic counterparts. The data also suggest that the academic performance of these athletes is statistically lower, on average, than the general student body. Though there is not enough data to confidently claim a dependent relationship between athletic identity and academic performance, the data trends towards such a conclusion. These tentative results are the first steps to gaining insight, establishing research priorities, and developing hypotheses for a large-scale study.