Especially since the Ivy League schools, unlike most other NCAA D1 FCS schools, tend not to take up offers from FBS schools paying FCS schools to play them (for a very high win probability for the FBS team).
I agree.
Chicago was able to eliminate football for 20+ years due to the influence of one charismatic leader, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Eliminating football was only one part of his vision. Most of his (or fellow travelers’) more important innovations didn’t outlast his tenure, nor did they have much long-lasting impact on other colleges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maynard_Hutchins
(see especially the “University of Chicago tenure” section for the impact of and controversy surrounding his decisions, including the one to eliminate football).
Interesting topic. I wonder if the SUNYs had big time athletic programs of they would draw more OOS kids? Some of them are quite good, but no draw there. (Obviously switching off the Ivy topic for a minute!)
I agree you could swap lots of schools onto/out of the league with no academic detriment to the league!
When I posed the question about the Ivies dropping football, I never meant to suggest that the average fan of Alabama or Ohio State would take notice. But it would be a big story in the national news, and ESPN (and the rest of the big sports media companies) would cover it to the degree that it would add to the debate regarding how the sport of football, in general, responds to the increased recognition of the role contact sports, the most popular of which is football, in causing permanent brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
@HRSMom, yours is a good question. Do you know why the SUNYs traditionally did not have big-time athletic programs? I’d always assumed it’s because the campuses are fairly spread out around the state and there is no “flagship” per se (at least that I’m aware of). And the state already has Columbia, Cornell, West Point, Colgate. and lots of other college football teams in a region where the love of professional football has ruled for a couple of generations.
No doubt, but would Brown or Cornell or UPenn suffer if they were no longer part of the “Ivy League”?
^I doubt they would.
You point out what is I think the biggest issue: no flagship. I have read they are trying to rebrand, no more SUNY, just Albany State U, Binghamton U, etc…
Chicago may be a special case; it wasn’t too long ago that UoC was holding active discussions on whether to drop undergrad and focus on Research, Research, Research.
SUNY Buffalo dropped football twice – once in the early 20th Century, for over 10 years, and then again for 6 years in the 1970s. It reinstituted football as a Division II (I think) team for 15 years, then stepped back up to Division I (and made a pretty big financial commitment, too) about 20 years ago. It certainly was never truly flush during that period, and football there has hardly been a big moneymaker. Some set of reasonable, reasonably gimlet-eyed people had to decide it was a good idea.
I see the same thing going on at Temple. It has no recent successful football tradition, but clearly its leadership does not believe the university can play in the academic big leagues if it doesn’t have a presence in Division I football, too.
What other highly selective, well-endowed, private research universities in the Northeast would you swap into the Ivy League? Tufts? Maybe. Although it’s already in a league, it seems to have more in common with the Ivies than with the other NESCAC schools (which are all small LACs). MIT, of course. I can’t think of any others, unless you go south of the Mason Dixon to consider JHU.
7 of the 8 Ivies were colonial colleges. Geography,history, academic excellence and the private research university model, as well as the sports league, together distinguish the Ivy League. There are other excellent private and public research universities dispersed all over the USA. However, for generations of Americans, “back East” was the target destination for the best concentration of good colleges. The Northeast, for most of our history, has been the location of America’s political, financial, and cultural capitals. Within this region, the Ivies arguably are the 8 best private research universities (other than MIT).
Actually, the political capital of the US has been south of JHU and the Mason - Dixon line for over two centuries, which is the vast majority of the time that the US has been an independent country.
@LucieTheLakie, most of the SUNY’s are young. Most didn’t become major full-fledged research universities until after WWII, and I can’t think of any school that was established after WWII that is a powerhouse in any major collegiate sport. This is true on the other coast as well. UCSD is a more impressive research university than most state flagships, but they’re not a powerhouse in any sport.
As for whether playing big-time sports will attract more OOS students, we have a natural experiment in Rutgers.
Certainly, football did a lot to propel PSU from being an ag college located in the middle of nowhere to being a major research U that is attractive to many OOS students.
Rutgers is a pretty interesting case, since it began to try to move up in football class in the early 70s, and it took several decades before they had any success. They will be a good case to follow based on their joining the Big10.
That plus the escalating sticker price for private universities.
There are a few schools that do well in sports other than football, and in fact don’t even have a football team. Denver University just won the men’s lacrosse championship, has won hockey and of course often wins skiing, but gave up football many years ago. Because there is no football, there are fewer women’s teams than other D1 schools of its type offer too, like women’s hockey. Damn that Title IX when it works against you.
In some of the western states, there is nothing but college football (Nebraska) so it takes on greater meaning to the residents of the state. Everyone knows someone who played there at some point, and there is no one else to cheer for, so why not?
Other than the risk of injury, I can’t think of any logical reason why the Ivys should eliminate football, if they can afford to offer it.
I have heard that some Ivy athletic programs are almost entirely paid for by the alums of those programs, like rowing/crew. I wonder how much the Ivy football teams are similarly supported by their own alums, who as a whole are more financially successful than non-athletes, I have read here on CC.
http://gocrimson.com/information/support/endowed
There are similar lists for other Ivy universities.
@twoinanddone, though DU is a century and a half old and they’re competitive in minor sports where the competition isn’t as fierce (so it’s easier to shoot to the top). That might be an ideal strategy for the SUNY’s as well, if they want to use sports to rise in prestige.
As an aside, while Hutchins got rid of football at the UofC, football helped build up that university. Amos Alonzo Stagg was a giant in the game and the first UofC president (Harper) was an enthusiastic supporter of the game (the visibility and money likely didn’t hurt). In the early years of the 20th century, the UofC and UMich often vied to be the top team in the West (today’s Midwest) and drew record crowds to their games.
I don’t believe that competition in lacrosse, hockey, and skiing is less fierce, and neither do those at DU. To win the national championship in lacrosse, they had to play and beat the best in the nation and do it by having to travel farther and more than any other team. This is the first time the championship has been won by a school not on the east coast. DU has just chosen to concentrate on sports that have smaller teams and that might be less expensive to run than a D1 football team, teams like gymnastics, tennis, and basketball. The hockey and lacrosse teams are pretty expensive to fund, but they are successful and do bring in money not only through ticket sales but through camps and youth programs that use the facilities 24/7/365. I think it is a pretty smart decision to concentrate on what the school can do best.
@twoinanddone, any NCAA title is impressive, but let’s face it, those sports don’t have as nearly as many schools devoting tremendous amounts of resources/money so that they can get ahead in them as do football and men’s basketball.
University of Vermont and University of Alaska do not have football teams.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/sports/03vermont.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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.
@twoinanddone, I am not talking about competition by kids for spots/scholarships but competition by teams to win a title. If anything, your argument supports mine. If there are only a limited number of spots/teams, then that surely means that there simply aren’t as many teams competing for the title in a sport, no? And yes, you named a few schools where sports other than football and basketball may be the most popular one (definitely at JHU, but try telling any Syracuse or UMD partisan that you would rather cut their basketball program than their lacrosse program). However, in the vast majority of schools, the Big 2 are the Big 2.