I have no doubt that there are kids who are playing right now at excellent academic FBS schools that didn’t sign with Northwestern because the football staff couldn’t get them in the door. But I also personally know a number of kids who played or were seriously recruited/offered by Northwestern (they recruit my kid’s school hard), all of whom went to a large suburban yuppie school. A couple had the athletic/academic chops to go and succeed at any school (excluding maybe some real elite football schools), including the Ivys. But a couple just didn’t have the academic stats to meet the AI requirements. I know one kid in particular who really wanted to go to one Ivy for whatever reason but could not get in. Last time I saw him he loved Northwestern, so it worked out.
As far as the application process, my information is somewhat anecdotal. I had a conversation with a dad (over a beer) who was annoyed after his son’s trip to Stanford that Stanford wanted him to actually fill out the application and apply to the school, while Notre Dame and Northwestern (among others) told him he was good. While that sounds trite, the issue revolved around the timing of accepting an offer. The dad was annoyed that Stanford wanted him to apply and then wait an indeterminate time to get the green light from admissions, which might have hurt the kid at other schools if it got out, particularly since signing day was approaching.
But if you swap out Brown and Dartmouth for Duke and Northwestern, Columbia with UChicago, and Cornell with JHU (assuming that schools will move to different sports tiers for this exercise); heck, let’s swap out UPenn for MIT as well, would the academic excellence, admissions selectivity, or even social eliteness of the Ivy League decrease at all?
So why do schools who are not HYP get some reputational benefit just because they play HYP in football?
I’m not sure any Ivy rivalry matches up to Harvard-Yale. I almost never watch televised Ivy games, but we watched the H-Y last year and it was one of the best competitions we saw all season. Great pageantry, great history, great game.
D3 is not possible for most schools. In short, the economics just do not work. The reality is that for most schools, D1, football and basketball pay the bills for rest of the sports. D3 would basically disallow TV contracts, corporate sponsors and league subsidies.
@scipio, Ivy schedules are changing in 2018 to try and capitalize on the rivalry issue, Princeton and Penn will finish against each other which is probably a good idea, since those schools have a history as rivals in basketball and usually draw well in football. Plus, those games are usually good for a couple chippy comments about how the Penn players couldn’t get in to Princeton or that the Princeton players are snobs, which is always good for a rivalry. Columbia v Cornell, Dartmouth v Brown and of course Harvard v Yale will be the rest of the final match ups.
I agree with @LucieTheLakie that nothing really is in the same league with Harvard v Yale though. The next biggest deal is probably Harvardl v Princeton or Yale v Princeton, but even that is not close. Two years ago, when Princeton was beating Harvard at Harvard, the Princeton student section started chanting “Harvard Sucks”. The Harvardities responded with “Yale Sucks”. Very funny.
@boolaHI , the Dayton rule would prohibit the Ivys from going D3. But why would they want to? The reason to drop to D3 is money, and it is not like the current D1 football budgets are hurting the endowments at these schools.
@purpletitan, to your point about relative prestige of the Ivys, a coach recruiting my son told me last year about an old joke. “There are four schools which make the Ivy League famous, and four schools which are famous for being in the Ivy League. The first four are HYP and which ever school the person making the statement attended.” So yeah, some of it is associative effect. But it is undeniable that each of the Ancient Eight are exceptional schools. As are any number of others.
In my day, we got a special medal if we won the “HYP” rivalry at my school–required beating both the other teams. Can’t think how to comment on this without outing my school! Otherwise, we most wanted to beat the “good” teams–which in my day in my sport meant Brown and maybe Cornell.
I loved college FB games. Went to every home game for 4 years as did most of my friends. Still pull out my sweatshirt for The Game every year. When living in California, went to some Stanford games–their student section was dead compared to my undergrad school. (This was NOT an era when Stanford had good FB).
“In my day, we got a special medal if we won the “HYP” rivalry at my school–required beating both the other teams.”
I’m not surprised. I shared an office with a [HYP} class officer while he/she was drumming up class donations. If anyone has any illusions that their alumni donations have anything to do with whether they liked their school, think again. All it represents to them is a chance for another “special medal”. It’s just the Harvard-Yale game taken to another venue. [throw in Stanford and/ or MIT too, on a case-by-case basis, if the sound-bites work better].All they want is to beat those other schools. Most donations, highest rankings, … I heard it every day, seemingly for months.
And to think, that operant conditioning started with those special medals. Smart administration.
Getting back to the original post, since I eventually got what OP was getting at:
I haven’t read anything in the alumni rag to indicate that the increasing information out there about football injuries, cumulative and otherwise, have become a really hot topic of discussion on campus. Maybe because so few people there are involved with the football team.? [ Or even realize we have one?]
If none of the university’s constituents are raising the issue, it’s unlikely the administration will do so itself, for the reasons I referenced previously in #27.
But evidently the students & alumni don’t care enough to do so. At this point.
There’s a great documentary about Harvard-Yale football that will give people with patience an idea of what Ivy football players look(ed) like, and how they look 40 years out. It gives a first hand flavor of the time(1968) and the college campus environment. Tommy Lee Jones appears, as well as many others. Its available on netflix and seems to be available on hulu for free, so here’s a link. In any case, you’ll get a feeling of why the Ivy league isn’t going to drop football anytime soon.
“But if you swap out Brown and Dartmouth for Duke and Northwestern, Columbia with UChicago, and Cornell with JHU (assuming that schools will move to different sports tiers for this exercise); heck, let’s swap out UPenn for MIT as well, would the academic excellence, admissions selectivity, or even social eliteness of the Ivy League decrease at all?”
No, it wouldn’t. I don’t think anyone is arguing that ONLY the Ivy League has excellent, selective schools. Of course there are many other schools with outstanding academics that are on par with, or in some cases better than, many of the Ivy colleges.
“So why do schools who are not HYP get some reputational benefit just because they play HYP in football?”
They don’t. Or at most any such benefit they get is very minor. The individual schools’ reputations are built by the schools themselves, based largely on their own merit, and not on whom they play in sports or what league they joined in the mid-20th century. I don’t see “Academic Strength of Football Opponents” anywhere in USNews’s (or anyone else’s) ranking factors to measure the academic merit of individual schools.
If being in the same athletic league with, or playing football against, academic high flyers had a major impact on any given college’s academic reputation, then schools such as say Washington State or Arizona State would be tearing up the academic rankings - because they’ve been in the same athletic conference with Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA for many decades.
I don’t think so and neither do most Americans in the know, but don’t tell me that you never heard someone on CC pick school X instead of Y or rank X higher than Y “because X is an Ivy”.
BTW, go overseas, and it’s worse. On The Student Room (the UK version of CC), most people wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about Dartmouth or Brown (or Duke or Northwestern), but many would assume Brown and Dartmouth are better just because they play football annually against HYP.
This thread is about making a “leadership” statement to other schools by dropping football programs.
If you feel the headline “Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, MIT, Wash U and Johns Hopkins drop their football programs” would have the same impact on the national college football scene as OP was thinking when he suggested “Ivy League drops football programs” - and you could very well be correct- then you can start by running that up the proverbial flagpole at NU.
If you actually think “Ivy League:” as a whole has more juice than the individual schools aggregated merit, well that plays into OPs thesis, so they would be good to use for his purpose, arguably, so he believes. So why are you arguing about it here ?
If you want to hijack this thread and turn it into yet another “my school is just as good as Ivy league schools” diatribe, despite it being OT for the thread here, suggest start, yet another thread, or revive one of the old ones, to resurrect that line of thought. Again.
Personally I don’t think any group of football relative non-entitities, or institutions known for harboring mostly eggheads, dropping football would make any impression on those who are weened on it.
Now the headline “SEC drops football programs” - THAT would have an impact.
Obviously the biggest impact would be if Notre Dame and/or Stanford dropped football as those are the marquee high academic/big time football schools. I would venture to guess that if any one of the D1 Power 5 conference-high academic schools discussed here, Northwestern, Vandy, Notre Dame, Duke or Stanford, dropped football that alone would be bigger news and have a bigger impact on the national scene than if the Ivy League decided to drop football en masse.
I think the evidence that the Ivy League does not lead in this area is pretty stark. If people looked to the Ivy as leaders in college football, we would not have 13 and 14 game seasons, travel across country to play a Wednesday game, dedicated athletic housing, schedules approved by the athletic department or any one of a number other things that differentiate what the Ivy league is doing from big time football.
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is hilarious. Well worth watching.
My sister was at that game with her now-H, a Harvard alum. I remember hearing it on the radio and practically foaming at the mouth. My father was Y '45W, and I grew up in CT, so we were a staunch Yale family. When I think about it now, it is odd that it was actually being broadcast on the radio. Perhaps being located in Southern Fairfield County explains it. B-)
" In any case, you’ll get a feeling of why the Ivy league isn’t going to drop football anytime soon."
I guess you’re reasoning is :Harvard and Yale were both undefeated in 1909, and then they were next both undefeated again 59 years later in 1968. So the Ivy League won’t drop football anytime soon because its due to happen again in 2027. Is that it??
Or is it that two of the Ivy League’s teams had one particularly exciting game, under nearly irreplicable circumstances,47 years ago, therefore the league won’t drop football anytime soon?
I think many people there thought they already dropped football.
But apparently they have some company, including a couple other programs that have been mentioned on this thread previously: http://espn.go.com/page2/s/list/colfootball/teams/worst.html
It could be that if those schools cut their football programs nobody would notice.
Malcolm Gladwell has called upon the Ivy League schools to abolish their football programs because he believes, erroneously, that these schools set the tone for the entire country, when in fact they are outlier institutions in almost every regard. The parts of the country where football is almost a religion are not going to get rid of their collegiate programs because of what Harvard et al. do. These parts of the country don’t care. They have different notions of value and prestige that are not aligned with the values or perceptions of the Ivy League schools.