8% of high school football players compete in college at any level. 12.3% of male ice hockey players and 13% of male lacrosse players compete in college. In D1, the numbers are closer at 2.4%, 3.3% and 2.8% respectively, so the numbers would argue against the competition for college spots being more “fierce” in lacrosse or hockey than football.
As far as which sport would be missed more, Princeton drew about 1,800 fans per home game (6 Events) in lacrosse, about 2,000 in hockey (12 events) and just shy of 10,000 in football (5 events). At Syracuse, the football team averaged just about 40,000 per home game, and just shy of 4,000 per lacrosse game. Even on the East Coast, the numbers would argue that lacrosse or hockey is just not in the same conversation fan interest wise. Nothing against the smaller sports, but any look at the numbers in the NCAA makes it pretty clear that football and men’s basketball are really the engine that makes everything else go.
quotehe Ivy League really was great at one time. In fact, the Ivy League is the Grandaddy of college football conferences.
From 1900 and 1925, Ivy League teams won 20 out of 25 college football National Championships! Talk about domination.
Princeton, still, has actually won more recognized college football national championships (24) than anyone else. Yale has won 19. Yale’s famous football coach, Walter Camp, is commonly referred to as the “Father of American Football.”
Indeed, Yale continued to have more all-time wins than any other college football team until Michigan passed it on November 10, 2001.
Part of the reason I posed the question about the Ivies taking the lead in eliminating football is because of their history in establishing the college game here in the U.S.
@LucieTheLakie, except that few people know and nobody cares. Lacrosse was invented by Native Americans and codified by Canadians. If they suddenly stopped playing, will the lax hotbeds on the East Coast notice?
Stagg of the UofC invented many aspects of football, but how much of an effect did Chicago dropping football have on the college game?
I wasn’t like schools on the west coast could just pop over to Princeton and play a game on a Saturday afternoon in 1920. Of course the east coast schools won all the championships because they organized them. It’s like saying an American baseball team always wins the World Series or football team always wins the Superbowl.
When more schools were able to travel, more schools outside the east coast region started to win. Read “The Boys in the Boat.” Even in 1936 it was very difficult and expensive for teams to travel to the east coast to challenge the “National Championship” teams.
Re #80, at least at Cornell. when I attended, attendance figures did not perfectly track which sport would be missed most. The hockey rink had a fraction of the seating capacity of the football stadium. Hockey probably had lower attendance figures than football , but merely for that reason. Hockey clearly had 9 billion percent more interest among the student body, however.
Football was played during the nice days in the Fall, when it was pleasant to just sit outside for a few hours. The football team, truthfully, did not have a huge following, Regardless of whether more people were sitting in the huge but sparsely filled football stands on a nice Fall day than in the small but absolutely packed hockey rink in winter, There is nobody who attended who would have any question about which was the preferred sport on campus. It was hockey.
In recent years, Cornell has been invited to play a Thanksgiving match at Madison Square Garden, giving current students and alums of both schools a chance to attend. The sport they select to attract those alums is not football. It is hockey. And they have sold out the Garden every time, IIRC.
Frankly I think lacrosse was more popular on campus than football too, when I attended. And again attendance figures would likely be misleading. It was played in the Spring semester IIRC. A decent chunk of the Spring term it can be quite cold up there, even snowing, not pleasant to be sitting in the stands. By the time it gets nice out, people are heading towards finals. So the games quite likely got less attendance than they should have, due to weather. Yet students followed the team quite closely in the papers and cared about it, because it was very good, at the time.
So to reiterate and reinforce, football attendance figures can overstate the actual relative interest levels on campus in the football team, due to factors such as : much larger stadium capacity vs. other sports, and played during nicer weather. I’ll add another factor at some campuses, though not mine: an extensive pre-game social “scene”, that has nothing to do with football per se.
I went to a Yale-Cornell hockey game, and it was the coolest spectator experience of my life. The Harvard-Yale football game was a close second.
As the Ivys have become more geographically diverse, I would expect there is more support for football from their western/southern contingent of students.
But in fairness I should also point out our football team was not particularly good, any time I was paying attention. As I said before, there is a large amount of “fair-weather fan-dom”. When the teams are particularlly good, for whatever reason. probably lots of people will all of a sudden come out of the woodwork. And then, for that time, it will be massively popular. That actually happened, at my alma mater, very recently with basketball. For an unprecendented few years they were actually really good. And apparently drew big crowds. Versus when I attended we weren’t sure where the games were even played.
re #85:
“I’ll add another factor at some campuses, though not mine: an extensive pre-game social “scene”, that has nothing to do with football per se.”
After I wrote that, I vaguely remembered a fraternity-sorority social scene
at my school actually took place during the games! So some of these people were there. But they were not paying attention to the game.