She was never a star athlete or a championship coach. In fact, there were star athletes and championship coaches who disliked her a great deal, when Jan Kemp famously cleared her throat and spoke up more than two decades ago about what was rotten at the University of Georgia.

But the impact of what Kemp had to say -- and of what she did -- resonates today.  Her exposure of academic fraud within the Bulldogs football program helped set in motion a host of reforms that have made college athletics at least a slightly more civilized place today.  At the very least, she helped expose the underbelly of a profitable beast and forced us all to examine it.

"She had an impact in convincing the world that the off-the-field stuff in college sports was important," said University of California-Berkeley professor and author Murray Sperber, who has written several acclaimed books on the conflicted coexistence of big-time sports and higher education. "And she took an enormous amount of s--- for it."

Kemp fought hard enough against powerful, popular opposition that she should be remembered and revered.

What she did took more guts than slamming into the middle of the line on fourth-and-1.

For everyone who cares about maintaining education's fundamental role within the pseudo-professional world of college athletics, Kemp is a hero. For every athlete who has been helped toward a degree by enhanced academic support, Kemp is a hero. And for everyone who ever stood on principle in the face of institutional backlash, Kemp is a hero.

If schools didn't care whether their athletes got an education, nobody was there to call them on it. Until Kemp did.

Kemp's stand -- at a time when Georgia was at football's forefront under Vince Dooley, winning the 1980 national title -- cost her her job as the English coordinator for Georgia's developmental studies program in 1982.

The professor sued the school and won her job back along with a $1 million settlement, but it was the university's arrogance in taking the case to court that led to seamy revelations about misplaced academic priorities.

The Georgia scandal dovetailed with other significant off-field scandals of the same time: a Creighton basketball player who came forward to admit that he went through school there without being able to read or write; a South Carolina football player who detailed to Sports Illustrated his steroid abuse; major pay-for-play revelations that rocked SMU football and Kentucky basketball.

A new level of accountability was reached and has been maintained, thanks in no small part to Jan Kemp.

"In the history of college sports, she's more than a footnote. Frankly, she's more important than Dooley. Coaches come and go. She had a lasting effect."