<p>I always thought picking one sport and then absolutely killing at it, as Duke does with basketball, was an excellent strategy for small, academically selective universities to follow. From what I have seen, truly nationally competitive athletics are necessarily at odds with solid academics - while someone that plays D-III sports might conceivably be academically strong enough for admission, D-I level players pull down the academic level of the university. This isn’t a problem in conferences like the Big 10 where freshman class sizes regularly hit 10,000 students or more, but at small schools like U Chicago, filling the rosters for a full set of D-1 sports wastes an unacceptable number of admissions slots. Focusing on a sport like basketball allows the school to have a marquee program while still only wasting ~5 beds per class on what are (for the most part) academically unproductive admits.</p>