<p>I watched both games on tv and acted like I’ve been an Army football fan my entire life. I’m just a tad envious that you could be there “live”.</p>
<p>And did you see that huge Baylor player pushing the cadet? The guy needs to go to class because I don’t think he realized where he was. 4000 cadets, all those officers, and rabid fans? Let’s not even mention weapons. And the cadet just moved out of the way and went back to play the game. I love watching these guys! It’s an ultimate sportsmanship lesson.</p>
<p>Chief, you don’t want to start a brawl but I’ll observe that at UCLA there are no mick majors and few mick courses. And three Pac-10 schools…Stanford, UCLA, and Cal…in that order…have significantly higher admissions standards than the NCAA minimums and the rest of the Pac-10 schools. And none will take Prop 48 kids.</p>
<p>And about those graduation numbers: you need to dig through them because they get affected in non-intuitive ways by kids transferring to other schools, etc. UCLA had a lot of turnover after the new football head coach came in. UCLA works very hard to keep the students in school once they’re admitted. And UCLA is going to look very well as the NCAA’s new “academic progress” standards come into effect.</p>
<p>Thedad: “no mick majors and few mick courses.” I had to read that twice–thought you were making some kind of Irish slur–some sort of ND reference, maybe.</p>
<p>Anyway, it got my Irish up! :D</p>
<p>(PS, not really Irish at all, but married Irish, which is almost as good.) </p>
<p>(PPS, you can slur the mouse all you want.)</p>
<h2>Go Boilermakers! We bought tickets to the Purdue/Iowa game (at $43 a pop), then S calls me and says HE bought us tickets. Anybody want 2 tickets?</h2>
<p>Tookie, If I was half way close to Purdue, I’d take you up on it. H and I are devote alumni and have taught our boys well too. S1 went there for one year, then transferred to a school without football, so he still cheers for Purdue out of default. S2 is also at a small school without football, but he couldn’t care one way or the other. He’s a NFL, Redskin fan all the way. Me? Give me college football anyday - I love it!</p>
<p>USC, a member of the PAC10, has admissions standards as high as UCLA and Berkeley. The PAC-10 has 4 schools ranked in the USNews top 30 National Universities. However, the graduation rate of the schools is not what it should be. However, USC and UCLA do not play the service academies. </p>
<p>Looking at the teams that the service academies play, in the second game of the year Army played Boston College which had a 95% graduation rate last year. ND, with a 92% graduation rate, plays Navy on November 12. Here is the list of the Division 1A schools with the top graduation rates for their football programs:</p>
<p>Boston College (95 percent)
Notre Dame (92 percent)
Vanderbilt (91 percent)
Penn State and Wake Forest (86 percent)
Duke and Rice (83 percent)
Stanford (82 percent)
Northwestern (81 percent)</p>
<p>Hey now! What’s with all the Ivy Sports bashing. There’s plenty of reasons to get into Ivy sports, if not necessarily football. Up until pay-for-play became the norm, Ivy Football & Basketball teams were right up there, and even now Penn is often ranked in NCAA I-AA football (as late as 2003, when we were ranked #12, & last year when we were #15). If they would just let us go to the freaking post season, we’d honestly still be competitive. Stupid administration.</p>
<p>The Penn/Princeton basketball rivalry is one of the most heated in the country, and who could forget the Big 5. It’s just no longer possible to truly compete on a national level when you have to recruit kids by saying: Well, you don’t get money, and you have to play Dartmouth & Columbia, but if you decide you don’t WANT to be a basketball player, you’ll have a nice career- that’s if you don’t fail out…</p>
<p>Not to mention the other sports in which Ivy schools are always really competitive, especially considering there aren’t scholarships- fencing, crew, Princeton LaX, Dartmouth & Cornell Hockey, etc… and for me to be sticking up for the other Ivies, it’s gotta be true.</p>
<p>Eagle79, for the football team, USC takes players that UCLA can’t touch. Give me a couple of hours and I can cite names and circumstances and it’s not just a few but many many many…I’m rather sick of hearing from UCLA fans that we should lower our admissions standards so that we can compete better in football. Also, some comparisons of admissions stats are misleading: USC, like most colleges, allows students to combine their best component SAT scores from separate sittings; the UC’s still use single-sitting scores, a handicap of 20-100 points.</p>
<p>tsdad: sorry, didn’t mean to hijack the thread, just stir the pot a little - and it didn’t take much. I love watching college football and I always root for my children’s teams - even when their teams play my alma mater.</p>
<p>FYI - There used to be a magazine poll that ranked party schools. Interestingly enough Dartmouth, my alma mater, wasn’t included on the list. But, on the bottom of the page in small type was an asterisk - Dartmouth was excluded due to “professionalism”. I suggest any football rankings should include similar asterisks for certain schools. :)</p>
<p>Chief6- What else is there to do at Dartmouth but study & drink? (I’ll be doing one of those two things next weekend for the Penn/Dartmouth Football Game- guess which)</p>
<p>I’m listening to the sports news – the Stanford coach apologized to the fans for losing to UC Davis, the sports announcer called it the most embarrassing loss in college football, and they are still partying in Davis. Gotta love it.</p>
<p>And I apologize to my son’s school. Columbia won its first game, meaning they will have at least as good a season as last year when, I believe, they won one game. Roar, lions, roar!</p>
And the cadet just moved out of the way and went back to play the game. I love watching these guys! It’s an ultimate sportsmanship lesson.</p>