By Request: Ivy League Football
Aaron asks:
I want to know why and when the Ivy League football hegemony ceased, and why paternalistic white guys with old money haven’t bankrolled more scholarships to attract stellar athletic (but subpar academic) talent.
For one thing, Ryan Fitzpatrick is the best quarterback in the NFL, so don’t say Ivy League hegemony is dead!
More seriously, Ivy League football hegemony’s demise was the result of a suicide pact. The Ivy League schools collectively ban merit scholarships of all kinds, including for athletes, and have various rules in place about the academic standards their athletic programs need to meet. Because the schools still give out plenty of need-based financial aid, and most certainly do give recruited athletes a boost in the admissions process, they can often put together really stellar teams in sports that aren’t the subject of big money recruitment elsewhere. When I was in college, for example, Harvard assembled a ridiculously dominant women’s ice hockey team that featured a whole bunch of medal winners in the 2002 Olympics. But football’s not like that and you can’t compete with what are, in effect, professional teams within the self-imposed constraints of the Ivy League.
52 Responses to “By Request: Ivy League Football”
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January 9th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Blago impeached.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Dartmouth, I believe, was at one point one of the best teams in the country. It is still the best team in the Ivy League. Guess it has to do with their outdoor spirit.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
“the result of a suicide pact”
um, not really.
if you are a university, then killing athletic teams is not killing yourself.
what *would* have been a suicide pact is if the universities had allowed the athletic teams to destroy them as universities.
something had to go, and the universities chose to live.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Dartmouth, I believe, was at one point one of the best teams in the country. It is still the best team in the Ivy League.
Dude, Dartmouth was winless this past season. They got beaten by Columbia.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Also note that the Ivies still enforece admissions qualifications for their athletes. Granted, they are a bit lower than the non-athletes, but they are far more stringent than other Division I schools.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Even if they relaxed some of the requirements, it is hard to see them being able to compete with schools that have 40,000 enrolled undergraduate students and fill up stadiums with more than 90,000 or more people for every game. A full stadium like that is, I would think, a huge part of choosing a team. If you think going to watch OSU vs UM or UF vs Tenn as a recruit doesn’t have an influence…
January 9th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
And most of those UM-OSU players can spell better than MattY.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
It’s odder to me that public universities in much of the northeast (NY, NJ, MA, ME, NH, VT, DE, RI) aren’t in the big-time football/basketball business. Some of those states don’t have a lot of people, but neither does Nebraska. Undoubtedly related to the sports primacy of Catholic colleges in the region, but as cause, or effect?
January 9th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Matt writes, “The Ivy League schools collectively ban merit scholarships of all kinds.”
Ummm…Isn’t this an illegal cartel?
If not, it should be.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Matty G, that is literally the dumbest thing I have heard today. Please elaborate for the class
January 9th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Stanford doesn’t seem to have too much difficulty competing in the PAC-10 and it seems to think it is an Ivy-West.
I guess it’s a matter of priorities.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I’d also suspect that any player sufficiently skilled to expect an accomplished college career would look at other schools with established football programs as a better jump point to the NFL. A common knock on players from lesser-known DI programs is the quality of the opposition, and many of them become undrafted free agents at best. For example Patriots tight end Ben Watson went to Duke before transferring to Georgia. While some Ivy league players have become stars in the NFL (Matt Birk and Jay Fiedler spring to mind), there aren’t many others who aren’t journeymen/special teamers. It may also be dependent on position, with offensive linemen and quarterbacks requiring more intelligence than, say, defensive linemen or wide receivers.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
GtheK,
I hope readers do not get the impression that ALL Ivy League intercollegiate athletes are admitted with “a bit” lower qualifications than the general student body because that would be unfair. MOST Ivy League intercollegiate athletes have to meet the same qualifications as the majority of other applicants.
In my day, we had a Special Admissions program limited (as I recall) to 10 or 20% of the student body for all categories of special admittees: children of alums; geographic, ethnic, racial diversity; athletes; low income applicants, veterans, and the “unusually and non-athletically acomplished with ho-hum SAT scores.” (Job example of the latter: the concert violinist who can barely add and subtract).
January 9th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Standford and Duke both compete so it can be done (much easier in basketball of course). Its mostly because the Ivies swore off bowls. If they would allow their teams into bowls football would suddenly become popular as alumni could spend money on warm vacations come December. After all its not like the Ivy League has been terrible in NCAA basketball after all.
It has absolutely nothing to do with scholarships.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Rob,
I respectfully disagree in part. Abolishing the post-season ban, without more, will only allow the Ivy League’s football teams to participate in the 1-AA playoffs (or whatever they are called this year). It will not enable the Ivy League’s football teams to be competitive with the likes of Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, or even Rice. If you want to competitive with those teams, the League would have to offer athletic scholarships. Those schools do, the Ivy League does not.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Alan, athletes *do* in fact get substantial boosts in Ivy admissions. I’d recommend Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission, which details exactly the extent to which even the non-football sports (fencing, squash, etc.) get real boosts in the admissions process.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Let’s not fail to mention that this week Boston College beat #1 North Carolina and was subsequently beaten by Harvard. The beginning of the rise of Ivy Sports!
Also, college football is huge in the northeast. Only it’s a different type of game altogther. These are real student athletes, who play their hearts out 10 Saturdays a year.
I went to Oklahoma and Miami. Those are semi-pro teams were the kids are brought to school for one reason only…to play football. Once they get injured or lose eligibility they are sent right back into the streets. The lucky ones will get a job at Safeway. The NCAA is a disgusting organization.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Matt,
As the parent of a pretty gifted athlete who is also a very hard working student ranked near the top of the high school class, I’ve been party to the recruiting game in a small way.
The short answer to Aaron’s question is that schools in the Ivy League (and the rest of Division III, for that matter) emphasize the student part of the student/athlete experience while the Division I schools want athletes first and foremost. The long answer follows.
If you can put up 20 points a game and bring down 10 boards, then you’re Division I material (as long as you can also bring a 17 composite on the ACT). They want athletes who can bring fame and fortune to the university and they’ll bend over backwards to help the student get through classes. In return, they expect the kid to recognize that athletics is the reason they are at the institution. Have a conflict between a class and a scrimmage? Miss the class. Its athletics first and foremost. In return for the devotion that is required to the program, the athlete gets the opportunity to squeeze in an education… to the extent that they can.
The Division III school that offered my child a visit was different. It more interested in whether my kid would be able to succeed in the classroom than it was about athletic ability. The basketball team organizes practices and games around class schedules of their students. Discipline and devotion are required to be a successful athlete and are the same characteristics required to be a successful student. The school realizes that athletic achievement is important but not so important that they devalue the educational achievement.
The NCAA runs a series of commercials that say that of the many student athletes enrolled in NCAA schools, only a handful become professional athletes. The others, in whose number I expect to count my child, go pro in something else. There’s nothing better than a great education to help with that, eh?
January 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Ivy football is also I-AA, not I-A, which has fairly stringent requirements as far as stadium size and average attendence (30K/15K, I believe, and I doubt any Ivy school hits both numbers). Bowls are for I-A schools. Basketball is different because there are 300+ teams in Division I basketball, but only 120-odd in I-A football.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Why on earth would this policy be an illegal cartel? I don’t see the logic.
Personally, I think that the decision to only do need-based financial aid was one of the smartest things that the Ivy League ever did. Having admissions focused (mostly) on academics maintains the standards and purpose of the schools. And as a student within one of these schools, there’s a sense of equality that wouldn’t be as present with merit-based scholarships.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I’d also note that Harvard won the Men’s NCAA Ice Hockey championship in 1989. I don’t think the program is the consistent national power that it was under Bill Cleary in the 1980s.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Oh yeah, and our Basketball just beat BC…
Having taught and advised many student athletes at Harvard, I can tell you that it is very hard to be a top notch athlete and fulfill the academic requirements in similar fashion to other students. The athletes fret about this constantly, and about the impression among the student body that they ALL got a break in admissions. If the athletes perform on average worse than others, it’s due to added strain of practice and games – in addition to the requisite extracurricular activities all ivy student get themselves into. Not because they have less ability by and large.
So the Ivy programs would probably never be top flight unless the school is willing to accept widespread additional grade inflation for athletes, which I doubt they will ever do. Even if they were able to offer scholarships.
The way it works now I think is that there has to be an average team standardized test score. So they pad the roster with really high scoring kids, which opens the door for some really talented kids with lower scores to be the stars. This was definitely true for the Woman’s Hockey teams that were so dominant.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Um … how can they swear off something of which they are not a part? They’re not Division 1 (Football Bowl Subdivision), so they aren’t even eligible for bowl games. Nor have they been for some time.
Am I missing something? Seriously.
I think everyone is over-thinking this a bit. Seems to me that Ivy League schools just decided to remain focused on academics first, then athletics. Dozens of other schools decided the reverse and, thus, started to draw away the better athletes.
Also, if all you want is a place to hone your skills before jumping to the pro level, why go somewhere you’ll have to worry about grades so much?
After all, if I want to be, say, a doctor, Harvard makes sense. But if I want to be a starting QB in the NFL or a forward in the NBA, then places like Miami (Fla.) or Memphis, respectively, make more sense.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
It may also be dependent on position, with offensive linemen and quarterbacks requiring more intelligence than, say, defensive linemen or wide receivers.
Going by the Wonderlic scores (a decent I.Q. proxy) given at the NFL Combine, the general rule is that the closer to the ball the player is at the start of a play, the higher his IQ score.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
The best comment in the whole thread.
**applauds**
January 9th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
When I worked at Harvard the mens hockey team won the national championship, we’re practically brothers.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Yes they are I-AA now, so? The question is how did they go from being powerhosues to I-AA alsorans. And it because they banned bowls, not because they limit scholarships.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
When I was in college, for example, Harvard assembled a ridiculously dominant women’s ice hockey team that featured a whole bunch of medal winners in the 2002 Olympics.
Hmm. Harvard has never won an NCAA women’s hockey championship. I’m guessing that Harvard was “ridiculously dominant” against the approx. five other schools that bothered to field a team at the time.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Stanford, Duke and BC are not Ivy League schools. There are only eight, and they are the ones that aren’t allowed to provide sports scholarships. There’s no sense comparing BC or Stanford to the Ivy League schools.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
The Ivies do, indeed, have need-based only scholarships. As in, “We need a goalie.”
Only three schools have won NCAA Div I Women’s Ice Hockey championships: Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth, and Wisconsin.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Harvard is actually a mutual fund (that is funded by
donations) with various schools attached.
Consider: the endowment was $36 billion before the latest
crash and charitable foundations are expected to spend
5% of their endowment each year ( but Harvard’s endowment
is not so required). 5% of $36B is $1.8 billion.
If there are 10,000 students that works out to
$180,000 per student. Instead they just keep growing
the endowment.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I’m not sure if imposing restrictions on all division I schools similar to those imposed by the Ivey league would make much difference. College baseball is dominated by the same big division I schools (I know, with several very big exceptions) as college football, and yet each school is limited to about 11 scholarships. That’s total scholarships, not per year. With a roster of 35, that’s less than one-third of a full scholarship per player (in practice, the total is not spread equally among the players). Since the big schools have so little to offer the full roster of players, one would assume a more equal distribution of the talent. But that’s not the case. The best players continue to gravitate to Texas, FSU, Miami, Arizona, etc. Wouldn’t the same happen in football?
January 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
J M Neal: Harvard is competitive with that group and has I’m sure played in title games. Matt’s right on this one, that team had some studs on it in the early-mid 2000’s.
and ctaclub, quit hating on Harvard…
January 9th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I’d also note that Harvard won the Men’s NCAA Ice Hockey championship in 1989.
Against Minnesota, in fact, in OT. Many people say it was the greatest college hockey game ever.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
ctaclub, I basically agree with you about the relationship between the endowment/Harvard Corporation and the educational institution, but your enrollment guess is way off — there are over 6,700 undergrads alone, and according to wikipedia total enrollment at the University is over 19,000.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I’m not sure what the average gpa/sat score of an ivy league football player is, but I did find this for the Pac-10 as a point of comparison:
* GPAs
Stanford: 3.63
UCLA: 3.15
Oregon: 2.94
Cal: 2.93
Wash: 2.86
Ore St: 2.84
USC: 2.80
Wash St: 2.80
Ariz: 2.76
Ariz St: 2.76
* SATs
Stanford: 1176
UCLA: 990
Cal: 984
Ore: 969
Wash: 963
USC: 955
Ariz: 948
Ariz St: 937
Ore St: 928
Wash St: 920
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/collegesports/2008/11/06/pac-10-football-admissions-data-for-all-schools/
Clearly, this is on the now “old” 1600 scale, but it gives you an idea of the kind of break a school like stanford gives compared to its peers.
It would be interesting to compare these numbers with ivy league numbers if someone can find them.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
It was a good one. But I’m partial to the BU game a few years later, they lost but it was a better game. I can’t say who they lost to, I can’t. I won’t.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
@ 35 raylward
Since the big schools have so little to offer the full roster of players, one would assume a more equal distribution of the talent. But that’s not the case. The best players continue to gravitate to Texas, FSU, Miami, Arizona, etc. Wouldn’t the same happen in football?
well, think about it for a moment. the schools you mentioned are all in good weather locations.
if you’re a baseball player good enough to get a college scholarship and maybe play on the pros, you want to go where you can play the maximum number of games.
the schoools in the north that even HAVE baseball programs can’t really start playing until mid-april, and sometimes not even then. the school year is over by early/mid-june. qed, why would any baseball player with a southern option go there?
January 9th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
The last Ivy team to win a year-end poll was Princeton in 1935. They pretty much stopped showing up in the final “Top 20″s around 1950, although Dartmouth did end up at #14 as late as 1970.
Three Ivy players won the Heisman: Larry Kelley and Clint Frank of Yale in ‘36 and ‘37, and Dick Kazmaier of Princeton in ‘51.
January 9th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
As a Harvard grad who needed a lot of financial aid to make it through, I’m glad the Ivies have stayed focused on needs-based financial aid.
I will also note that former NFL running back Calvin Hill (Grant Hill’s father) went to Yale.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:47 am
A couple posters above have the order of things backwards: the Ivy League is Division I-AA because it turned its back on the bowls and athletic scholarships, not the other way around. At the time these choices were made, the I-A/I-AA division did not yet exist (and for that matter, most other I-AA schools do have athletic scholarships. Someone above seemed to think the Ivies were division III, but that is not accurate).
January 10th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
The question is backwards. It’s not why the Ivies don’t have good football teams. The question is why all the other schools are running minor league football teams. The average– *average*– football SAT is 1176? In other words, there are a lot of football players with worse SATs than that? (And no doubt they have athletic “scholarships,” though the “scholar” part of that is in doubt.) What’s the average SAT for non-athletes, do you suppose? Something like 1400, I’m sure.
If Stanford wants to have a minor league football team, why do they force the players to pretend to be students?
January 10th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
No one has mentioned rowing, but it should be pointed out that the Ivies dominate rowing, and they do it by recruiting athletes who don’t come close to meeting the regular academic standards. I’ve rowed and coached since I was in high school, and some of the dumbest Ivy League grads I’ve met are rowers. Of course, many of them actually learned something from an education at Phillips Exeter and Harvard and are very successful in other fields after college, but the fact remains that dozens of academically brilliant students don’t get in to Ivy League schools every year because someone decided it was in the institutional interest to make their boats go faster than Boston University and Northeastern’s boats.
If a kid is smart enough to graduate prep school and happens to be in the 99th percentile of height and weight while meeting minimal coordination standards, he or she can go to an Ivy League school as a rower. The scholarship will say “need-based”, but someone will find a way to make sure the kid gets enough money to choose Columbia over Virginia. While in college he or she will be a rower first and everything else second.
I find it pretty disgusting because lots of kids still don’t even have access to rowing. Of course, the Ivies compete in this area rather than football and basketball because it lets them accept wealthy white kids who are prep-school-approved and whose parents are alums/donors/the right sort of people. The sport also looks good in admissions brochures. Even though they’re bad at football, let’s not pretend that the Ivy League schools maintain some sort of mystically pure academic focus.
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