If being a BMOC is important to you I would bet that’s more likely for an Ivy rower than a rower at a football or basketball powerhouse.
@cleoforshort You are incorrect regarding Ivy vs. D3 for baseball. There are probably over 300 D3 (I’m sure I could find the number) baseball teams. In 2017 those D3 teams produced 12 players drafted by MLB. The 8 Ivy schools produced 13 draft picks that same year, 4 at one school alone.
There are 32 Division 1 baseball conferences. Year end 2017, the Ivy Conference ranked #14 of the 32. To which division would you like to compare the 18 conferences that finished below the Ivy in baseball last year?
@Tanbiko I said that the kids who perform “on the field and in the classroom.” Believe it or not there are smart athletes at big schools and some dumb athletes at the Ivies. There are challenging courses of study with brilliant students who do not attend an Ivy.
@nhparent9 Even within D1 not all programs are equal and that is so in Baseball too. I bet that probably most of the athletes would like to be in a top conference for their sport. If there are 32 conferences being in the middle of the pack is not a top conference. The Ivies May attract some top players who want an Ivy education but not because the conference is strong. My son’s friend had 7 offers at better Baseball schools but is holding out for a lesser Ivy team because his parents want him to get the Ivy degree, certainly not because the Baseball is better.
With few exceptions the Ivies would be hard pressed to compete against the top D3 schools.
In what sports do you believe this to be true? It is not true for football. It is not true for wrestling. I doubt seriously it is true for men’s basketball or lax. You seem to concede above that it is not true for baseball. We have seen this discussion take place among knowledgeable posters in T&F, swimming, crew and a number of other smaller sports over the years. I can’t think of one where the weight of opinion from people who apparently know the sport would support that statement. It does seem that many posters believe the spread between women’s sports across the divisions is narrower, and if that is what you are referring to, then maybe there is some merit to what you say. But it is not true for men’s sports.
I think the poster will be hard pressed to name a single sport where D3 teams can compete with Ivy teams
With some rare exceptions average athletes at the CC-admired schools stack up like this:
Athletically:
Top D1 > Ivies > Top D3
Academically:
Top D3 > Ivies > Top D1
Lol, it is amazing how many threads devolve into how D3 is just as good as D1 athletically. Pretty sure the 2 posts above are for the most part accurate. There are a few sports at a few schools where the Ivies can compete against top D1, but not many. I assume that is the case for top D3 against Ivies at a few of the more niche sports, although I don’t know for sure if that is accurate, I don’t have any specific examples where top D3 is better than an Ivy team.
Are there guys at Ivy schools who would be starters at top D1 teams? Yes, but that certainly isn’t the norm. Likewise there are D3 athletes who could compete in D1, but that isn’t the norm either. In most sports your athletic outliers in D3 would be average players in D1.
And that’s ok. You don’t need to defend your kid’s athletic abilities even though they went D3. The fact that they made that level probably means that they are still an exceptional athlete, especially if they were able to generate some D1 interest. I have talked to more than a few people on and off this board who had a child go D2 or D3 or go Ivy because they could be a competitive athlete at that level rather than a low or middle of the pack athlete if they competed up an athletic level. A good friend of mine played D2 basketball. He was a 4 year starter, and he would probably have come off the bench for 4 years in a decent D1 program. In his case, he wanted to play so he turned down D1 offers and went the less prestigious athletic route so he could get on the court. In my personal case, S would be an athletic outlier in the NESCAC, but he would have probably been near the bottom academically. Both of those are reasons he passed on a couple of NESCAC schools who were recruiting him. He wanted to compete against the best competition, and he didn’t want every class to be a struggle.
@Ohiodad51
Men’s basketball :Of the 351 teams UPenn was ranked highest at 102.
Wrestling: Of 200 top ranked wrestlers (top 20 divided by weight class) the Ivies had 5 athletes represented.
Lax does better: Yale is ranked 5, Cornell 6.
No one watches Ivy league football, it’s sole reason for existence is day drinking.
Hockey: Cornell represents as a top ten and Princeton makes an appearance top 20 depending on who’s doing the rankings which you would expect because there are about 60 D1 college hockey teams and the Ivy league has about 1/7 of the players.
Niche sports like Rowing and Fencing are well represented by the Ivies, but I’ve seen the strong Wesleyan boats beat D1 boats on more than one occasion, and MIT fencing (D3) does pretty well fencing against the Ivies. A good SEC team will blow out an Ivy Football team anyday, however an Ivy team has less of a chance of blowing out a good D3 team.
oops, better keep fencing outta this one. Ivies along with Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State and St John’s are by far better than DIII fencing schools with the occasional exception of NYU.
As a group, Ivy wrestling does not compete well against the Big 10, although the data for other conferences isn’t really all that much better.
Cornell is the exception, they had a national champ this year as they do most years and finished 7th nationally.They are the only team besides Iowa to finish in the top 10 for each of the last 11 or 12 years. For purposes of this discussion I will consider them a top D1 and not an Ivy. Although if we are cherry picking examples of how the top end of one division could compete in another, then Cornell proves that the Ivy wrestlers can compete with the top D1.
If you eliminate Cornell from the discussion, the Ivy league teams usually have on average a few of their 10 guys who can compete well against all but the very elite in the sport. They may have a guy or 2 who could be replaced by a top D3 wrestler, but that wrestler would most likely have a losing record wrestling an Ivy schedule (which is generally a pretty easy D1 schedule). The average D3 wrestler could well be winless wrestling an Ivy schedule.
In summary, at least in wrestling it is very true that Top D1 > Ivy > D3, and I don’t think that it is really close. I don’t think using wrestling as an example helps your argument that Ivy is comparable to D3.
@cleoforshort, I don’t think anyone is arguing that the Ivy is a dominant or even very good D1 conference, except maybe in certain sports that are frankly regionally and economically somewhat restricted. But that is a very different thing than saying the Ivy is the equivalent of a D3 conference. It is just a different level, with different expectations, facilities, competition and, in the main, a different category of athletes.
Talking about the sport I know best, football, what @dadof4kids says is on the money (with the obvious exception that there is no analogue to Cornell wrestling in football). There are a sprinkling of real P5 level players in each recruiting class, along its a few who are probably closer to D3 level coming in, but the majority of the players are going to be athletic mismatches in D3. As far as the conference in general, all the Ivies would get smoked by pretty much everybody in the P5, and well more than half of the G5. It is a mid level FCS conference, and the top half of the conference is probably competitive with all but the very top handful of FCS teams. But even the weakest teams in the Ivy would do very well against the top of D3.
@chelsea465 Notre Dame and Penn State are consistently the fencing schools to beat. Last time I checked neither of them were Ivies. The Ivies do have a strong presence in this niche sport. however (just as an example) MIT men’s fencing beat 3 of the 5 Ivies they fenced. As I am sure you know, MIT is DIII.
@cleoforshort: Well, considering that Columbia won the National Championship back to back in 2015-2016 and was runner up this year, and that Princeton won in 2013 and was runner up in 2012 and 2014…I think most folks in the sport would say that Ivies are usually in the hunt. And if we go to the individual winners from this year alone, 4 of the 6 were from Ivies (2 Princeton, 1 Harvard, 1 Columbia).
I don’t follow MIT fencing that closely, but again, looking at the 2018 National Champion competitors, only 1 out of 144 fencers was from MIT. Her final standing in women’s epee? 21st out of 24 competitors.
Since you piqued my interest…I’m on the MIT Men’s Fencing page now. This season…
- They lost to Yale 9-18
- They beat Cornell 20-7 — But keep in mind that Men's Fencing at Cornell is a club, not a varsity sport
- They beat Brown 16-11
- They beat Dartmouth 22-5 — Like Cornell, Dartmouth fields a club team, not a varsity team
- They lost to Harvard 7-20
So, versus varsity programs, the MIT men went 1 and 2. And based on Brown’s showing at 2018 Ivy Round-Robins (they came in 6th out of 6 teams, with an 0-5 record)…it’s safe to say that Brown does not have the strength of say Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia.
@SevenDad My point was that there are Ivies that can be beaten by DIII schools, and there are. One of my posts above says that Ivies have strong showings in some niche sports, and they do, however they are susceptible to DIII schools, and they are.
But I’ll give you the win on this one because I know how strongly invested you are in fencing. 
@cleoforshort: I don’t know if I’d say I’m “invested” (though I once kept track of every penny we spent on fencing one season — WON’T DO THAT AGAIN!) but strongly interested in the sport, yes!
And when someone says that MIT has a better fencing program than several Ivies, my ears perk up for sure. 
@SevenDad , methinks thou protesteth to much!
I speak as a lacrosse parent twice over. :))
@SevenDad I started to add that up once. I made it about halfway through the season and I know I missed some expenses. I then decided that I really didn’t want to know, and certainly didn’t want my wife to know, so I stopped the exercise.
It’s actually coming back to us now. But there was certainly no guarantee of that and I was not expecting scholarship money when I was spending it.
Why on God’s green earth would you do such a thing? One of the best things about being a football parent is that the biggest expense is generally the food bill. Although I have spent my share on JO volleyball and travel baseball, both my kids got off of those particular trains before the costs got completely insane. We have family members who are big time travel baseball/softball parents, and a good friend whose son played travel hockey until he burned out on the sport mid way through high school. I shudder to think what the outlay has been over the years. I don’t think I like either of my kids that much.
I never expected to get one cent back in college scholarships that I paid for sports. I was spending money on sports and equipment just like I was spending money on Girl Scouts and violin lessons and the costumes for the drama program. It was just part of life.
I did consider the fee for summer club to be equivalent to the fee for the trip to France her sister took. I did justify some of the travel for tournaments as ‘would have been spent anyway’ because we visited colleges while we were out and about.
@luckyblack -My concern has always been the academic support at the Ivies vs. other Div I schools. Kid had his accepted student days recently at an Ivy and met with one of the advisors. Of course they can’t offer ‘special’ tutors to the athletes due to Ivy league rules, but it sounds like the sign up for tutors is very simple and happens directly after registering for courses. And while the grandparents kept reminding me that “Ivies don’t give scholarships” (like I didn’t hear it the first time), the financial aid at said Ivy ended up better than athletic or merit aid from other DivI schools AND it’s not tied to athletic performance.
@cleoforshort - nope, sorry. 2018 NCAA’s: 5 Ivies in top 16, 1 DIII (NYU), 2017 NCAA’s: 6 Ivies in top16, 1 DIII (NYU)
'Not saying that it’s a reflection of the schools, but there’s no way DIII fencing is competitive with DI, Ivy or otherwise.
Michael Phelps came out about his suicide thoughts and there are wide-spread of depression among elite swimmers, for the most if not all of other “mortals”, focusing on academics and using sports if possible to get into the best academic settings, is always a wise move. NCAA is profiting from student athletes, student athletes have to take care of themselves, go with the academically superior school that fits you the best.