anyone want to speculate on the impact of unionization (Dartmouth hoops) on the future of D1 at the Ancient Eight?
The proposed roster sizes still need to be agreed on and approved in court. A lot of details still need to be ironed out. Honestly, any changes should go into effect 2026-27 year in my opinion. It’s already too soon to have these proposed changes go into effect 2025-26 year
I would think numbers transferring out of IVY would be small. The SA is giving up the opportunity to obtain an IVY degree
I believe the proposed changes would affect all schools in D1. Ivys could opt out of being D1 of course
The proposed changes do not affect all D1 schools. Right now, it is just the 4 power conferences. Any school or conference can opt in to revenue sharing and would have these roster limits. It’s doubtful that the Ivy League would commit to revenue sharing. I also doubt they’d would look to leave D1. They are very competitive in many D1 sports on a national scale.
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@hispeedvcsel , I would think so too. (And if it were my kid, that’s probably the position Id take.) But one could make the same argument at Stanford, and Stanford has seen quite a few departures. Then again, perhaps Stanford has a higher tier athlete gunning to go pro, so it might be more strategic for them. But it’s not just football. Includes women’s basketball and softball.
I’d bet that dropping down from D1 would become a serious discussion if unionization is approved.
(Dartmouth basketball players need to be careful for what they wish for)
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Only if they opt-in the revenue sharing which the P4 have been mandated (I think) to do.
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Higher tier athlete and possibly lower (more recruiting wiggle room) student. Priorities and goals are likely different.
As others have mentioned, the Ivy League does not have to opt in to the revenue sharing framework.
No way is D3 even a possibility.
One area that might get discussion at some point is revisions to the Ivy League limit on grad student participation.
Currently Ivies do not allow grad students to compete in athletics. In contrast, schools like Stanford, Duke, ND, etc have the ability to pluck grad transfers from the portal (often graduating Ivy League athletes).
Given some of the changes to rules during Covid, the conference does have some experience with relaxing those standards and also with larger numbers of fifth years (due to gap years, not redshirting).
I could see conversations happening there, although not many of these schools have grad programs where the bar to admission is as low as some of the revenue-generating programs at other schools.
But I’m not sure these schools are that interested in making those sorts of changes, nor do I necessarily think they should.
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Last year there were a lot of Ivy grads playing lax (men and women) for other lax schools - Duke. UNC, ND, Maryland, DU. They all had eligibility left, so why not get a grad degree? And coaches were very happy to pick up a 22-23 year old player with 4 years of experience, even it was only for 1 year.
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But that is over after this year.
The Covid extra years are ending but athletes will still have 5 years to use 4 eligibility years.
So any Ivy athlete taking a redshirt year will have eligibility left, and in other conferences it’s common in some sports to take all 5 years.
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The U of Utah quarterback is starting his SEVENTH year. He was at a Texas school (didn’t play but was on the team) his freshman year, red shirted his second (maybe an injury) and then covid gave him 5 years. Shilo Sanders at CU his playing his 6th (and he’s a grad student) and even his father the coach doesn’t know how the math works out.
I think the math is getting very fuzzy with number of transfers, playing 4 or fewer games (in football)… these college athletes are getting a little long in the tooth.
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Thank you for clarifying this! There are a lot of folks in the baseball podcasting community that think it will affect all D1 schools.
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I think a common denominator for most of those transfers was 1. They still want to play the sport and 2. They want to play with and against the best as well as contend for a NC. If the Ivy League schools become uncompetitive in sports such lacrosse, how many future top HS players will commit to play for there teams.
I don’t think the Ivies will become uncompetitive in lacrosse (or hockey, or crew, or the other sports where they’ve always been competitive) because the schools put the funding into the sports (recruiting, coaching, facilities). There are always students who want to go to the Ivies, no matter what. For some players, it really does come down to money, but that’s always been the case that someone who needs scholarship money can’t go to an Ivy.
Some top lax players I know went to Army. That’s an entirely different choice. One chose Army over Princeton (where he had committed as a sophomore in HS).
But if they did become uncompetitive and have no chance at a national championship, there are still 100 who want to go to an Ivy and be part of the team and vie for those 7 to 10 spots being recruited.
Not sure if the question of this thread is whether the Ivies would be dropping their academic standards to get better athletes or dropping the athletic standards to even field a team. I don’t think either will drop and it will remain as it is now - some teams attract the very best athletes who also happen to be great students, and some have to build a team from walk ons who happen to be great students who were accepted without a hook of being recruited but still are pretty good athletes. I’d bet Yale could form 3 more lax teams just from the students on campus who played in hs but who didn’t go the recruited athlete route.
Lacrosse isn’t my sport but to me it seems one of the least likely to suffer from concentration of talent due to revenue sharing (and any related dilution of talent in conferences not opting in).
Very few of the big money schools/conferences where this could be an issue even have lacrosse as a sport. So I’m not sure which programs would be more likely to attract and concentrate talent in the future vs. now. There just don’t seem to be enough of them to make an impact.
Yes, an NIL collective at Denver and JHU and others could have a distributional impact, but I’m not sure there’s enough potential of that being widespread enough to dilute the talent pool available to Ivies.
I don’t think the academic standards will drop, but the performance on the field/court will across the Ivy League in the nationally popular sports like football and basketball.
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I recently talked with an Ivy League head football coach about this topic. His take was that the transfer portal will increase, rather than decrease, the performance of football/basketball in the Ivy league and that NIL will have negligible impact. He said that the transfer portal has the biggest impact and has resulted in two benefits for Ivy League recruiting: (1) a substantial decrease in high school recruiting by D1/D2 schools (a juco transfer is a better bet than a high school senior), leaving more high school athletes available for Ivy League recruiting; and (2) high school athletes have begun to realize that inbound transfers make their chance of staying on a D1/D2 team for 4 years tenuous at best (and that NIL money is equally tenuous). As long as the Ivy League continues its historical reluctance to athletic transfers, the Ivy Leagues provides greater roster stability than any other D1/D2 league.
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