<p>
</p>
<p>Virtually all of the “lowest-band” athletic recruits at a place like Amherst would be on one of those three. Football generally consumes more than half. Not many rocket scientist/ice hockey players either – the recruiting base only comes from a handful of states. About the only time you’d see a “low-band” slot allocated to another sport would be a situation where you have a nationally ranked player who could single-handedly turn, for example, a tennis team into a championship caliber squad. The intent is always to spread these “low-band” slots around “once the football program gets better”, but that never happens. There’s no such thing as a “low-band” squash player. I don’t know about California, but not too many Massachusetts public high schools have squash teams!</p>
<p>That’s what killed football at Swat. It just became a black-hole for the available below-average admissions slots. What really killed Div III football was specialization at the high school level. It used to be that you could get 50 guys and figure out what positions to play them at. Maybe you didn’t have an ideal left tackle, but neither did your opponent. Now, you can’t compete unless you’ve got a left tackle with four years of specialized experience at that position and so on a so forth. The pool of left tackles with the academic qualifications to get into a Swarthmore or an Amherst is infintesimally small. Multiply the need for specialized recruiting at every position and you can just throw your academic standards out the window.</p>
<p>In report after report from all of these colleges, they bemoan the segregation that occurs among “certain” athletics teams from the campus community as a whole and the negative impact that has on college life, both socially and academically. Well, duh! If the average SATs at Rice are 1447 and the average SATs of your 96 football players is 1082, how in the world could you expect that group of students to just “fit right in”? They don’t fit in. How could you expect them to not feel estrangement? How could you expect the other students to view them as academic peers? </p>
<p>This issue becomes seriously problematic a school the size of Swarthmore or Amherst where the football team alone is nearly 10% of your male student population. 1 out 10 guys segregated from the campus culture right out of the blocks, in every freshman dorm, in every class, in every social setting, is a pretty significant detriment to a cohesive community. But, football is the “third rail of higher education” so guys like Morty Shapiro try to put band-aids on problem with “new alcohol policies” and housing lottery regulations to prevent de facto segregation, none of which works because it’s not addressing the fundamental problem of the admissions office trying pound round pegs into square holes.</p>