<p>Actually, I don’t think Virginia can look to Michigan/Cal as models. Even though Mich/Cal have fairly high academic standards, but when it comes to athletes, the admission standard is pretty loose for them. One of the things Stanford loves bashing against Cal is the low admission standards Cal uses for its athletes. Keep in mind football needs to take a lot of athletes and you have to make quite a bit academic compromise to build a nice recruiting class. If Virginia wants to have football programs like Michigan, it would have to lower its admission standard for them. Schools like Northwestern and Stanford (thought Stanford has great teams in most other sports) don’t consistently have good football teams. Duke has the worst D-1 team. I think its easier to build a good basketball team, however, for academic-oriented schools like UVA. Since you only need to recruit a few each year, it’s easier to find good athletes (still not easy) without compromising admission standard too much. Not to mention UVA does have a pretty decent team already.</p>