<p>Here’s another article on the subject, I think it’s well written and a good analysis. After reading it, I have more appreciation for Dr Weiss’s position. </p>
<p>[Differing</a> visions of Lafayette College’s football success fueling dispute between boosters, administration | lehighvalleylive.com ](<a href=“http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/brad-wilson/index.ssf/2010/12/lafayette_colleges_differing_visions_of_football_success_fueling_dispute_between_boosters_administra.html]Differing ”>Differing visions of Lafayette College's football success fueling dispute between boosters, administration - lehighvalleylive.com )</p>
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So Bourger sees Lafayette caught in a three-way squeeze between elite scholarship schools (include Fordham in that mix now, remember), the Ivies with their deeper pockets (as one veteran sportswriter puts it, when the Ivies really want an athlete, they find a way) and the less expensive, but considerably less prestigious, private colleges. But Weiss might like being just where Bourger does not. </p>
<p>After all, the Patriot League always gets grouped with the Ivy League when people discuss “non-scholarship” football. There’s a certain cachet to being a non-scholarship football program, especially in the East, where suspicion of scholarship football and its excesses runs deep and wide. </p>
<p>Weiss might look at the Colonial Athletic Association, the league that puts lumps on Patriot League teams when the two meet, and see schools that he doesn’t wish Lafayette to be associated with. After all, if the PL gives scholarships then it’s just another league, nothing special, not always linked to Harvard and Princeton but one expected to compete with Delaware and James Madison. And if that becomes the expectation, then attempting to meet it might involve sacrifices, academic and otherwise, Weiss doesn’t want to make. </p>
<p>In one way, the Patriot League is caught in a squeeze of its own: it’s non-scholarship, like the Ivies alone in their lofty castle, but chooses to compete in the FCS playoffs, which the Ivy does not. No Ivy coach would be expected to play a team such as Delaware — much less beat them — in a game that mattered, whereas Patriot League coaches face that situation every season. And as one longtime observer of Patriot League football admitted to me this fall: “Our teams just can’t compete with those CAA teams.”
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