<p>The ACC, with its last expansion, has totally prostituted itself to football and a private university with a relatively small enrollment is now a misfit in a conference with the likes of Miami, Florida State, Virginia Tech, Clemson, NC State, GT, Maryland etc. Only BC really matches Duke in mission and it is a would be football factory too.</p>
<p>Duke has to recruit 90 athletes to compete in this league and has seen its allocation of ACC tournament tickets diminished. It has a small stadium.</p>
<p>In Duke’s situation, so long as I could keep playing UNC, I would move in a second to the Ivy League. All I would need to make it happen is enough TV pull to keep my basketball program competitive.</p>
<p>jrpar-name recognition counts because athletic contests are played in front of crowds, and hopefully on TV. When you play, you want to have people care whether you win or lose. You want people to love you or hate you, but at all costs, to at least have an opinion about you and not ignore you. You want people on travel to check for your team’s score in the local newspaper.</p>
<p>If you are going to expand your League you want to increase and exponentially, if possible, the number of people who care how you do. And if you could get on national cable television and have diplomats and businessmen and even heads of state around the world begin to care about how you do, then you have gained something through expansion.</p>
<p>Duke and Georgetown would get the Ivy League on TV. With Penn, Princeton and Columbia, added in, a financially viable Ivy League tournament would even become a possibility. And people in distant places would care how the teams did.</p>
<p>Vienna man, have you watched Ivy League sports? TV?! Maybe locally. UPenn basketball, yes (great game vs. Duke basketball last year on national TV and this year they are going to play UNC), but not many other Ivy League teams are on TV, and if they werethey wouldn’t draw much of an audience. Ivy League sports are good, but in most case they aren’t big time Div I sports and (and here’s the important part) don’t aspire to be big time Div I sports. (Ivy League hockey, and Penn basketball are exceptions).</p>
<p>Lots of “important” people already care about Ivy League sports, but that doesn’t mean they want to see them change. As for heads of state, I think our head of state probably at least checks the score of the Harvard-Yale football game.</p>
<p>jpar-You prove my point-think of what it would mean if the President of the Philippines, the Head of the European Commission, the Crown Prince of Spain, the King of Jordan, the Chief Spokesman of the United NAtions, the First Lady of California, the President of MIT and the senator from Alaska at least checked the newspaper for the score of a Harvard-Georgetown game.</p>
<p>I don’t know about BC - too much of a sports school, too little of an academic school. Keeping geography intact, MIT, Tufts, JHU, and Georgetown would be the best bets.</p>
<p>It would mean increased name recognition and publicity that couldn’t be bought. All schools in the expanded ten team league would benefit. Georgetown’s national and international name recognition from its high profile alumni and Basketball heritage and Duke’s recognition from the legions of basketball fans who have cursed or cheered its bball team for years would shone a light upon the expanded Ivy League. Simply put, more people would care about Ivy Sports and more students would want to attend the schools to be a part of “where the action is.”</p>
<p>Vienna man, couldn’t your rationale just as easily be applied to any major sports school? Why aren’t we proposing to induct the University of Nebraska into the League, in that case? </p>
<p>Georgetown and Duke, not to mention other strong sports schools, would crush the other Ivies and simply fight it out amongst themselves. The other Ivies would mock them in return for being “newcomers” and “intellectual lightweights” and rest on their laurels. It would be a divided league.</p>
<p>Other major sports schools do not have the high powered academics of Georgetown/Duke. </p>
<p>The real line of demaractation would be the superiority complex the Georgetown people would have from the rigor of their five course per term schedules which would lead to ‘slacker’ and ‘30 or 32 course’ cheers and the like when playing certain Ivy schools. But that would be part of the great fun of the whole thing when the slacker schools would do ‘resume whore’ or ‘go have your head of state stuff it’ and ‘junior politician’ cheers cheers in return when playing Georgetown. A whole lot more exciting than the current state of affairs don’t you think?</p>
<p>(I personally completed my grad work at Columbia, in two of its top-5 grad programs and went to Georgetown SFS undergrad. There was no difference in academic rigor. Georgetown people were more interested in applying knowledge to policy rather than chasing down pure logic and wanted to get to the point of aguments faster, but there was really no difference in the quality of discourse).</p>
<p>And seriously, the athletics would be pretty closely matched, and a lot of interaction already takes place between the schools in sports like crew.</p>
<p>Duke is not exactly the terror of the ACC in football and might welll likt to be in the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Coumiba 2007-you really do overstate the power of Duke and Georgetown athletics relative to the Ivy League, especially if look at it across the board. Looking at all the sports, in most it would be very close and competitive which is exactly what a sports league would want.</p>