Southern Ivy League

College Search & Lists
101

<p>They successfully field a team that has won and that gives other teams competitive games. This is amateur athletics. They could lose every game. So what? They have teams that go out, play hard, and give nationally ranked teams good games quite often. I guess your definition of success is very different from mine for college sports. Besides, you are focusing on football because it “helps” your argument. I believe they have done better in basketball.</p>

<p>I am not even sure what you are arguing, frankly. If you can’t win at the highest level give it up? Drop down to DIII so you can demolish the competition? COLLEGE. Not pro. COLLEGE We have so lost site of what college sports are supposed to have been about.</p>

<p>But again, your original argument was that if they gave up on high level sports they would move from #4 to #3 or #2 or #1. Not even sure what #1 or #4 means, but in any case after all the back and forth, this seems more clearly false than ever.</p>

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<p>I never made any such claim. Kindly point to the post where I made such a claim.</p>

<p>In fact, in post #69 I wrote:</p>

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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064130794-post69.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064130794-post69.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>My point? I’d much rather have a degree from a school that commands immediate respect for its academic reputation rather than for its prowess in the arena. (I plagiarized myself from another thread).</p>

103

<p>prestige,
Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame are all places that command immediate respect for their academic reputations. Period. All are Ivy peers in the student quality and the quality of their undergraduate education that they provide.</p>

<p>I also think your national title standard is silly-schools can be athletically successful without winning a national championship. Look at Davidson last year with their basketball. Their students and alumni, probably most of whom are not regular basketball fans, LOVED every minute of their team’s run in the NCAA tournament. </p>

<p>Would you not consider the Final 8 a success for Davidson?? Of course it was. </p>

<p>Do you think that this success hurt the school’s academic reputation? Not at all. </p>

<p>Corbett,
Think about the comparison you are making between Rice football and Princeton football. Rice regularly competes against nationally ranked teams like the University of Houston, Princeton plays against the University of Pennsylvania (not Penn State :slight_smile: ). Rice plays against Southern Miss, Princeton plays against Columbia. Rice plays against Oklahoma State, Princeton plays against Colgate. On and on I could go, but I’m sure you get it. Rice is playing real football on a national level, often in front of large crowds, against some of the most successful opponents in the USA. Princeton is playing at a level not much different from many Texas high schools. And in front of smaller crowds than those high schools. It’s a different caliber and a different experience.</p>

<p>And yet despite those differences and the much larger demands that go along with that, Rice football players did as well in the classroom as the Princeton football players. How about giving them some congratulations? You know, good things and good people do happen outside of the Ivy League, even at schools that play in nationally relevant athletic games.</p>

104

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<p>This is a first-hand account by a Notre Dame athlete. Does it count as a “data point”?</p>

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<p>[Debunking</a> the myth of ND admissions standards](<a href=“http://www.ndnation.com/boards/showpost.php?b=football;pid=49335;d=this]Debunking”>http://www.ndnation.com/boards/showpost.php?b=football;pid=49335;d=this)</p>

105

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<p>Not only are these things not logically consistent, but also they can be empirically supported.</p>

<p>A school can sacrifice its admissions standards for a subset of students to field as competitive teams as possible. The success of the teams generate publicity and name recognition, which attracts more applicants. More applicants improve the rankings which attract even more applicants and so on…</p>

<p>Presumably, at some point, there is going to be diminishing returns when the school will lose as many students due to it overriding sports focus as it gains.</p>

106

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<p>Not even the most rabid Rice supporters would agree with this. </p>

<p>Rice had 2-10 record last year, which included some of the following blowout losses: 55-10 @ Texas Tech, 63-14 @ Navy, 49-7 vs. UCF and 73-14 at Houston. This is not “real football.”</p>

<p>Rice averages approximately 20,000 fans per game, the overwhelming majority of whom are visiting fans. This does not constitute “large crowds.”</p>

<p>For what it’s worth, there is a significant contingent of Rice students and alums who want to quit football or at least drop to a lower division. Much to their chagrin, apparently a former Rice football player is on the school’s board of trustees.</p>

107

<p>…and yet ND’s Academic Progress Rate for its football team is still awfully good when compared to schools that actually play Division I sports…and not too bad when compared to schools that don’t. </p>

<p>2009 Academic Progress Rates (based on 2007-08 school year data) , College</p>

<p>939 , Nat’l Avg for Division I</p>

<p>974 , Notre Dame</p>

<p>976 , PENN STATE
970 , UC BERKELEY
963 , U FLORIDA
953 , U WISCONSIN
948 , UCLA
947 , U MICHIGAN
947 , U NORTH CAROLINA
939 , U TEXAS
937 , U VIRGINIA
930 , U ILLINOIS</p>

<p>996 , U Penn
992 , Dartmouth
991 , Brown
991 , Yale
983 , Cornell
983 , Harvard
980 , Columbia
979 , Princeton</p>

<p>982 , Bucknell
980 , Colgate
979 , Holy Cross
978 , Navy
975 , Lafayette
967 , Army
955 , Lehigh
na , American</p>

<p>Also, I’d be happy to present on other sports such as basketball (men and women), baseball, ice hockey, lacrosse, etc. ND scores at the same level as many Ivies in all of these sports.</p>

<p>As for Rice, do you know how their football team did in 2008? If not, look into it.</p>

108

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And finishing 2-10 last year. Rice was dead last in Conference USA, which is not a particularly strong football conference. How “nationally relevant” was that?</p>

<p>We can find out, by looking at national rankings. The Sagarin computer rankings (which address all DI teams) put Rice at #144 nationally. Rice was ranked very close to Ivy runner-up Harvard at #147, but well behind Ivy champ Penn at #116. In terms of quality, Rice football last year was higher in quality than the Ivy average – but was still within the Ivy range. If Rice had scheduled Penn last year, the Ivy team would have been the favorite.</p>

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I did, in Post #92 above. But I don’t mind repeating it. Kudos to Rice football! </p>

<p>Last year, Rice had an academically strong football team (roughly comparable to Ivy quality) that didn’t fare very well on the field (again, roughly comparable to Ivy quality). There isn’t anything unexpected about this.</p>

<p>The surprising thing is that Rice didn’t get academically strong performances out of its other men’s teams (except indoor track). If you respect the academic performance of the Rice football team (as I do), then do you also agree that the academic performance of its other men’s teams is unsatisfactory?</p>

109

<p>Graduation is a modest metric. Given all the academic help and support services available to ONLY athletes at the expense of other students and the availability of jock classes/majors and so forth, the athletes probably couldn’t flunk out if they even tried.</p>

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<p>But Notre Dame isn’t selling itself as most other “schools that actually play Division I sports.” It is supposed to be a “top 20” school. ND claims that it’s better than the SEC, Big 12, Floridan, Texan and Californian schools against which it competes for football recruits. Remember the slogan: “Catholics vs. Convicts”?? </p>

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<p>So you concede that Rice does not play in front of “large crowds.” And you do know that Conference USA is not a BCS conference, right?</p>

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Huh???</p>

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No, more applicants doesn’t improve the rankings. If you mean it make the admission rate look like a smaller percentage, that is such a small part of the USNWR ranking criteria, if it even still is, it has nothing to do with them being top 30 schools. If you look at the number of apps they get compared to schools that are given here as examples of non-athletic schools, you won’t see a great deal of difference relative to their size. Furthermore, you could double their admission rate percentage and it wouldn’t move a single one of these athletically inclined schools we are discussing out of the top 30. Your argument holds no water.</p>

111

<p>meangirl,
I guess it depends on how you define “large crowds.” </p>

<p>I actually tracked this for two seasons because I am a big believer in the enjoyment that students will get from a more active and fun athletic scene. There are big differences between what you’ll find at Stanford, Duke et al and what’s on offer in Ivyland where the typical attendance for games was between 5-10,000. The one major exception was the annual Harvard-Yale game. </p>

<p>In 2008, Rice attracted over 23,000 fans to its home football games. The Owls won 9 games, including a win in the Texas Bowl in front of 58,000+ fans. (corbett-this was also the year measured by the latest available NCAA APR data that I referred to). </p>

<p>For home attendance, I calculated something that another CC poster dubbed the Hawkette index, which was the average home attendance divided by the size of the undergraduate student body. </p>

<p>Ratio College (Div I)</p>

<p>9.7 , NOTRE DAME
7.4 , WAKE FOREST
6.6 , RICE
5.7 , USC
5.7 , VANDERBILT
4.8 , STANFORD
4.2 , DUKE
4.1 , U MICHIGAN
3.8 , U VIRGINIA
3.3 , U NORTH CAROLINA
2.7 , UCLA
2.6 , UC BERKELEY
2.5 , NORTHWESTERN</p>

<pre><code> College (Div I/III)
</code></pre>

<p>3.1 , HARVARD
2.4 , YALE
1.8 , PRINCETON
1.5 , U PENN
1.1 , DARTMOUTH
1.0 , CORNELL
0.8 , BROWN
0.3 , GEORGETOWN
0.3 , COLUMBIA
0.3 , CARNEGIE MELLON
0.3 , TUFTS
0.2 , WASH U
0.2 , MIT
0.1 , U CHICAGO
0.1 , JOHNS HOPKINS</p>

<pre><code> NO TEAM

CALTECH
EMORY

</code></pre>

112

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They finished at #48 nationally in the Sagarin rankings, with a win over Western Michigan in the Texas Bowl, a minor bowl. Attendance at Reliant Stadium was 58,880, slightly more than the most popular Ivy games (for example, the 2009 Harvard-Yale game drew 52,692). </p>

<p>But was 2008 really a typical Rice football season? Not at all – in fact, 2008 was the most successful season over the last 50 years. Before 2008, Rice’s last bowl victory was in 1954. In fact, the 2008 Texas Bowl was only the second bowl appearance since 1961.</p>

<p>Obviously hard-core fans dwell on the victories and gloss over the defeats. But let’s try to keep a sense of perspective. As Wikipedia puts it in the opening paragraph of its article on “Rice Owls Football”:

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113

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<p>This is a slick and subtle but ultimately unsuccessful move. </p>

<p>All this time you’ve been arguing that schools such as Notre Dame provide an equivalent academic experience as the Ivies plus the athletic experience. A corollary to your argument is that ND athletes can compete with the ivy athletes in the classroom.</p>

<p>Now that you’ve been shown wrong, you shift the discussion by comparing ND athletes not to ivy athletes but athletes who “actually play Division I sports.” And when you say that ND is doing “not too bad when compared to schools that don’t,” you’re conceding that ND athletes are not ivy quality, which contradicts your original point.</p>

114

<p>I have no idea how this conversation turned to how Rice actually does on the field. First the argument was that Rice football players were well behind the other students, now they are Ivy quality. My head is spinning. Then the argument goes to being they are not very good. Who cares??? Again, the point of all this was does academic quality at Rice suffer because they choose to participate in D1 major sports. None of this says anything about that. They could lose every game by 100 points, and it wouldn’t say anything to the original argument. Granted then they might want to rethink the level of competition, and even now they might, although just because one is 2-10 really isn’t the point. Using that reasoning UNC-CH should give up mens basketball given their quality of play this year so far. In amateur sports, being worse than your opponents is not a shameful or a bad thing. They aren’t at Rice because they think they are going to the NFL, you know. This whole thing about Rice being #48 or #248 is so far off base. My God, no one thinks Rice is going to win a national championship. So what???</p>

<p>If Rice chooses to try and play with teams that are D1, why should anyone mind that? Now, if it can be shown that students at Rice are getting a lesser academic product because of that decision, then there is something to talk about. Other than one professor’s opinion, which seems to be contradicted by Rice players now being Ivy quality, there is no reason to believe that is true. Let’s get off of Rice, and while we are at it the whole thing about success for these teams that know they will never be national champions being measured by some index.</p>

115

<p>mg,
I believe that the ND athletes can compete with the Ivy athletes in the classroom. Their APR rates are nearly at that level and yet ND competes at a much higher level of competition. ND football also scores at a higher level than all of the publics and higher than many of the Patriot League schools.</p>

<p>I’m also not shifting in talking about other sports, but responding to your earlier posting which claimed that all student athletes at ND were academically uncompetitive. The APR data definitely does not support that.</p>

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<p>As I said earlier, very few people in these “large crowds” are there to see Rice. They’re there to see Rice take a beating by their favorite teams. Also, Rice’s average attendance is inflated because occasionally, Rice hosts Texan football powerhouses whose fans fill the seats. If you’re looking at the MEDIAN attendance at Rice football games, I estimate that it’s between 5-10,000, which is no higher than the ivy football attendance that you keep mocking.</p>

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<p>Perhaps this will give you some idea: </p>

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118

<p>meangirl - I have no idea what evidence you have for the motivation of the crowds at Rice games, but lots of teams have large numbers of opposing schools fans attend their home games, depending on their rabidity and the distance, and the desirability of the location. But unless you can really support that statement, I suggest you not try and read the minds of the people that attend. But again, really not useful for the topic that was supposed to be discussed.</p>

<p>Also, if hawkette’s statement was the reason the conversation turned (and I don’t think it was) then it is up to you to point out it is not pertinent to the debate, instead of dragging it out with further irrelavencies.</p>

119

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<p>I am fairly certain the the Ivies do not admit student-athletes with SAT scores in the 800’s and C’s on their transcripts.</p>

<p>If I am wrong about this, perhaps you’d like to provide me a data point to contradict my claim?</p>

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<p>Using one anectodal “data” point is very very dangerous, at least in the world of debate.</p>