Another way to expand your options is to include Physics as a possible major. Many schools offer some type of Physics/Engineering combination.
MIT, RPI, WPI, CMU, Rose-Hulman and Case would be great options. Maybe Chicago, Wash U, or W&L. Moms usually don’t like this suggestion but what about the Service Academies?
@chmcnm we had not considered Physics/Engineering so thank you very much for that suggestion! He really enjoys physics (which is beyond my ability to relate to lol) and that might be a very nice option for him. Regarding the Service Academies, that was actually something I suggested to him as a freshman. He got rejected by the Navy’s summer program that year and it turned him off the Academies and he has only recently expressed an interest in the Coast Guard. He toured their campus last year with his dad and does plan on applying. It’s the most straightforward app process of all the Academies given that no nomination is required.
@austinmshauri thank you and yes, he will be discussing directly with his dad when he visits over Christmas break. Better for DS to initiate that conversation than Mom.
@one1ofeach we for sure are not putting all eggs into one basket. We are pretty confident that UC Irvine is a safety, both acceptance and cost-wise (he would live at home), so that app will certainly happen - unless NMF happens…again, things will start to look a lot clearer for us - hopefully - on Dec. 10. If he scores a 221 or lower, we know he’s almost certainly out of the running, and 223 or higher, almost certainly likely to have met the 2021 CA threshold. If he scores 222, we will have to wait until the thresholds are released to know where he stands. Very, very stressful so we are trying not to think about it.
Hello @sherimba03. Let me try and give you a couple short thoughts to consider about Ivy/high academic recruiting. First, the Ivy and the Patriot are Division 1 FCS (the second highest division, home of places like Cal Poly and UC Davis). Army, Navy, Air Force are Division 1 FBS (the highest level, home of Alabama, OSU, USC, etc). At your son’s current weight, he is very undersized to play “in the box” in all of Division 1. To give you some context, my son is roughly the same height (he measured between 6’2” and 6’3” at the camps he attended) and was about 20-30 pounds heavier coming out of his junior high school season. By camp season that summer he was about 265. He worked very hard in college to get to and stay at a playing weight of about 280-285, and he was on the light side of what is traditionally one of the lighter offensive lines in the Ivy. Defensive linemen in the Ivy and the Patriot can be a little lighter, but unless he is very quick and is going to grow to 6’4”/6’5”, he will still probably need to be 250/260 plus of good weight to play at that level. Even bigger in the FBS.
The first question your son needs to answer then is whether he is willing and able put the work in to maintain that kind of weight. If he isn’t, then you might want to aim towards a lower division if football is something your son wants to pursue. There are a number of excellent academic D3 schools, including the Coast Guard Academy. Usually on this board when people talk about high academic D3s, they are referring to the NESCAC, home of Williams, Amherst, Tufts, etc. But there are many more. There are several D3 football programs at exceptional engineering schools, MIT, Case Western and Carnegie Mellon to name three. On your coast, the Claremont colleges split into two teams, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps and Pomona-Pitzer. If your son isn’t keen on getting substantially bigger than 235, that may be a more realistic level to target tbh.
Moving on to your more specific questions, I can tell you that the most significant academic question is what band your son slots into. From what you relayed, he would be a 4th band kid everywhere unless things have changed dramatically in the last few years. Unfortunately, once you cross the threshold into the 4th band it doesn’t matter what your actual stats are. The band system is designed to avoid “dumb-belling” where you have some very high stats kids balance out a low stat stud recruit. I can tell you that the level of play in the Ivy is pretty high, probably in the top quarter of the FCS, and no one is getting recruited just because they have good academic stats. Even the 4th band kids (like my son) could play at a high level and were generally all region/all state level players from larger divisions in decent to good football states as high schoolers.
I am not saying that means your son won’t get recruited. I am just trying to interject a note of caution because I have heard many, many parents over the years explain to me that there aren’t that many football players with academics like their son’s, therefore he would obviously be attractive to the Ivys if only as an academic booster. My experience has been that there are a fair number of kids with good talent who also have stellar grades, and pretty much all of them are going to look at the Ivy. At the end of the day, if a coach is looking at two kids who are both in the same band he is going to reliably take the better athlete, regardless of the specific academic stats. Does that make sense?
I can tell you that your son can have a social life and play football in the Ivy. My son was a STEM major and an officer of his eating club at Princeton. One of his best friends on the team and in his club (a defensive lineman) was a civil engineer, another is headed to med school. It can be done, but football and engineering is a tough ride and the kid has to really want it. There were several members of my son’s recruiting class who came in as engineers, probably because Princeton is one of the few Ivys with engineering, but not many stuck with it for all four years.
On the positive side, the Ivy is the recognized leader in trying to limit CTE/concussions. The league has very restrictive practice guidelines, led in no small part by Buddy Teevins at Dartmouth. The team neurologist at Princeton during my son’s career was the head of the NCAA concussion protocol. They take it seriously.
In case this all sounds negative to you, let me be clear. I am a huge fan of the Ivy model for the right kid. I think recruiting is harder for an academics first kid then it is for an athletics first kid, and the Ivy offers a very unique blend of top flight academics and really, really good football. There are not many places a kid can play at that level and retain control over his academic path and live in an academic first environment. For my son, it was an exceptional fit. I would encourage you and your son to give some serious thought to whether to pursue some options in the conference.
@Ohiodad51 let me say first of all that I am sorry for having confused you with @moscott who is also another fantastic resource and who I have chatted with recently. 
Thank you so much for this information - it is clear and very, very helpful. Neither I nor my son are really interested in seeing him bulk up much more, so unless he goes through a growth (height) spurt over the next six months I think you’re right that he’s more realistic to look at the D3 schools. When his coach told him he was a strong candidate, I think that might have come along with an asterisk of “you need to put on weight” that may not have made its way to me, lol. He did definitively tell me that he was only interested in pursuing DL, so there is that.
Honestly, at this point I think we’re going to take a break from football strategizing for about 9 more days. When PSAT scores come in and we know more about his chances of going the NMF route, we will be able to make a more informed decision about next steps. That may include finishing his GoBigRecruiting profile, or it might not.
You have some time yet. My son didn’t really start a serious recruiting effort until winter break his junior year, so you shouldn’t feel rushed. I am a fan of gobig for high academic recruiting, and I found it well worth the effort and small cost. So I would start there with a short highlight tape and profile over the break, keep an open mind and see what type of interest develops over his junior spring. I am not sure how much the early signing dates have effected high academic football recruiting, but in my experience from several years ago now, Ivy and high academic D3 recruiting starts in earnest during the junior spring. See what schools come in o visit your son at his school this spring, and who reaches out. As the process goes along this spring, my guess is you will develop a sense of schools that are interested. A wide net is key at this stage imho. Best of luck to him, and any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.
S21 came home very excited today…“Mom, ever heard of Carleton College? Their football coach pulled me out of physics class today to talk to me.”
I was smiling when I replied “Yes hon, it’s one of the outstanding LACs I’ve been telling you about.” 
LOL. Many of us can empathize. Rest assured that if his friends had told him about Carleton, he would have remembered.
Congrats to him on the coach visit. It is one of the first big steps on the recruiting journey.
@Ohiodad51 @twoinanddone @NJWrestlingmom and everyone else who has been so helpful on this thread, I have an update! DS21 received an email from MIT’s head coach inviting him to a summer camp. Yay! I’m very proud but so torn, for many reasons.
For starters, he scored a 226 SI on the PSAT and, assuming he doesn’t do something stupid and go to jail (lol), he is going to be a NMF next year. And he is very excited about going to UF! Given the OOS Benacquisto scholarship, it will be a full COA at a highly-rated engineering program and an all-around great school.
Honestly I cannot imagine choosing to pay $80k/year for MIT versus free for Florida…especially since it isn’t in the realm of possible. So the only way he could attend MIT (assuming the stars align and he gets in) would be if his dad stepped up big time. That is not likely to happen.
I’m also not thrilled about four more years of this very dangerous sport. Especially when he could get a world-class education for free without risking his brain or his body.
This is a good problem to have and it’s nice to have something to think about besides worrying about needing to cancel our spring break trip to Florida to visit UF, UCF and UM due to my worries about COVID-19 (I get sick really easily).
Congrats! MIT is very generous, so maybe they will surprise you! S17 has a non-athlete friend there, 1st gen college student and he pays almost nothing. Not sure what your income is, but fingers crossed!
Either way, he has great options! Keep us posted! I love hearing where everyone ends up!
He’ll probably end up playing club rugby at UF (assuming they have it), which will be super fun!
So, almost 4 months and one global pandemic later…we attended the virtual MIT football Junior Day recently. MIT is DS21’s top choice, hands down, and we think he has a solid chance of getting accepted. Given the fact that he has already received official offers of support from a Top 5 school (!!!) as well as two Top 20s, my head is spinning that he might well end up with quite a few tippy top acceptances. This was not something I had anticipated! Also not anticipated was the rapidly diminishing likelihood that the Univ. of Florida Benacquisto scholarship will still be in play. I have every expectation that the state of Florida will cancel the NMF scholarship program - at minimum for out of staters, due to the new recession/depression underway.
DS21 went into a Navy ROTC recruiting office yesterday. He had dismissed the service academies and ROTC last year but the MIT football coach stated that it’s “a thing” there, so it grabbed his interest and he is investigating. I am supportive, in spades!
Only time will tell, I guess, and in the meantime it’s been truly amazing to watch this recruiting process. I am really proud of DS21!
My son has a friend who plays football at Tufts and does Navy ROTC. They do their drills on the MIT campus, I think. He is excused from some of the football workouts due to his ROTC work, so this is something that could work. My son also has a friend who is a MIT baseball player. The coach there has next to no pull with admissions. There was a group chat with 15 guys who were recruits and applied EA. Only 7 were admitted. Best of luck to your son.
@scorekeeper1 so your stats - 7 out of 15 - fall exactly in line with what the MIT head football coach stated during Junior Day, that being high on the football team’s board means that you have about a 50/50 chance of admissions. So what I meant by DS21 having a “solid chance” is that, if he is supported by football, he goes from a 6-7% chance of acceptance to a 50% chance, lol.
So far MIT is the only high academic school that has indicated to DS21 they have football players who are also ROTC. There are sure to be schools out there that also do, but DS21 hasn’t spoken to them (yet).
Is this more than just rumor? I always expected them to get rid of Bright Futures too because when they raise the requirements fewer minority students received the awards and I just expected that the program would go away. Nope, in fact they raised the amount to now cover tuition.
@twoinanddone no, this is just my own view. Nobody else seems to be talking about the Benacquisto being voted out of existence by the Florida legislature. At least, nothing that I can find anywhere. Maybe I’m just being overly pessimistic…but I also thought that people who said the pandemic would last through the spring and then be all gone by summer were overly optimistic, so…
@sherimba03 What has your son decided to do? I can tell you my son is absolutely loving UF and they just recently moved up to #6 now ahead of Georgia Tech and #30 nationally with Tufts and NYU! You can’t beat a quality education like that for free!
@moscott thanks for asking about my son! After the unexpected flurry of football recruiting over the past six months as well as my concerns about Benacquisto (right or wrong), and good developments on the financial home front with respect to affordability, he has significantly shifted his list. Currently his top choice is MIT, and he just submitted his application last night. He received a handwritten note of support and encouragement from the head coach last week, which I put into the high school scrapbook I’ve been keeping!
Johns Hopkins gave him a likely letter and the coach really wanted him to ED there; same thing for Carnegie Mellon. He has non-football schools in the works, too, with ASU Barrett at or near the top of that path, which he is applying to as a presumed NMF (just submitted his NMSC application yesterday). Sadly (from my perspective), he decided not to apply to UF after all. I guess my concerns about the possibility of the full ride going away really got to him. I still think he should apply and I know he would love UF, but he is adamant, so there it is.