PurpleTitan, I really disagree, but it is just my opinion. I think Princeton would rather win the lacrosse championship as the Ivy league football title - unless you are the football coach. I doubt people, even at Princeton, would miss football as much as lacrosse, and of course that is the case at Hopkins (since it chooses to play D1 at lacrosse and not football), probably at Cornell, Syracuse, and even Maryland. I just disagree that competition in ‘other’ sports isn’t as fierce. Since there aren’t as many scholarships available in the other sports, and not nearly as many spots on teams in general, I think the competition is greater in those sports, more fierce, than football. IMO, it is much harder to get a lacrosse scholarship at UVa than a football one. Schools would never give up the football programs because the possibility of revenue is so high.
A football player who isn’t offered a spot at Alabama or Stanford might end up at a lower ranked team (but higher ranked school), or even at a D2 or D3 school, but a hockey player has many fewer options and often ends up at prep school or jr pro trying to get one of the few scholarships or even non-scholarship spots available. Fierce.
When my daughter was looking at schools, the coach told us the program would NEVER be discontinued because the school had a football team, and it needed all the women’s teams for title IX compliance. This is the smallest D1 school in the nation, in a tiny town, and shouldn’t be playing D1, but obviously the school was getting some benefit from fielding a D1 football team.