Better for me than Harvard?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I'm currently a sophomore here in England, and I am being recruited to play college AMERICAN football. After college, I want to try and work in football, either as a coach or a scout, with the eventual aim of becoming a Head Coach or General Manager. If these careers don't work out, I want to either go into the marketing/management side of sports, either working at a college, hoping to eventually get to be Athletic Director, or for any company, such as the NFL, any NCAA conference etc. in the business/management side, or in marketing. </p>

<p>So as you can see, after my dream jobs directly within football, I still want to try and work within it in someway, but in more of a business role with a sports background. Obviously, if I get to 40 something and nothing is going anywhere, I want to have a backup plan, which will probably be to work in management/marketing at any other company.</p>

<p>I have a 3.95GPA and attend one of the top academically selective schools in the UK.</p>

<p>So bascially, I want to play football at the highest level I can, while also getting a good degree. I've basically got 4 sets of options here. </p>

<p>1) harvard, Yale etc. These colleges dont offer any sort of business degree, so I would have to major in something else, probably Maths. Also, it is only D1-AA football, as well as being Ivy meaning limited big games, thus limited exposure as a student athlete, but the bottom line is, I get a Harvard/Yale degree.</p>

<p>2) Go to a D1-A football school, that also doesnt offer business, but is still a top ranked school, pretty much just Stanford. Better football/exposure, not quite as good degree.</p>

<p>3) Go to a top Business school, e.g UMich, Notre Dame, Penn Wharton. Mix of D1-A and D1-AA football schools, and not quite as prestigious as Haravrd etc. but give me the business degree that I want/need for my career path.</p>

<p>4) Go to a top sports management school e.g Oregon, Miami, Ohio State, UMass. D1-A football schools, but possibly even less prestigious that group 3, and although sports manegement is what I want to do later, it may be too narrow of a degree in case things dont work out?</p>

<p>So yeah, if you think about this hypothetically as if I could play anywhere, which of these would be the best fit for me in your opinions? Please feel free to add more colleges that fit in to these groups/that I should look at.</p>

2

<p>Why do you want exposure?
Do you want to play in the NFL? Because in that case go to an SEC school.
But if you are mosly going for the degree and the free education. Stanford and USC would be my top two choices. USC has a business school.</p>

3

<p>When I say exposure, its not only to maximise NFL chances, but everything that comes with it. Being exposed to higher level football will surely help me in the early stages of a coaching career. Bowl/televised games, better facilities, bigger crowd, all of that would go towards making a special college experience for me, which I’m scared I wont get at an ivy league school, because of the lower priority that sports take there.</p>

4

<p>How did you come to the attention of US college football coaches when you are only a sophomore and live on the other side of the Atlantic in a country that plays almost zero American football? I’m guessing you must be very large, very fast, and already excelling in some related sport like rugby to attract such notice.</p>

<p>As for your point number 1., it’s true that the only Ivy league schools that offer a Business major are Penn and Cornell. However, the equivalent major at Harvard, Yale, et al is Economics (not Math). In fact, the most popular major at Harvard is Economics.</p>

<p>However, for someone who aspires to a career in sports and sports management, I don’t think the Ivy League is your best bet. Not very many big time football players and coaches come out of the Ivy League. In addition to the SEC mentioned above, the PAC-12 and Big-10 colleges are probably better bets to get you where you want to go.</p>

5

<p>I’m 6’3 230lb so I guess I’m quite big, and I also play basketball and rugby, so I move well for a big guy haha</p>

<p>Also, which colleges in those 3 conferences would you recommend, and would you recommend sports management or a broader business degree? And which schools in those conferences are seen as good academically by general employers, if my football related career choices didn’t work out?</p>

6

<p>I don’t think you realize how good you have to be to play at Oregon, Stanford, and UMich. Not to knock you down but the competition in the UK is not comparable to the high school programs in Florida, Texas etc. To be able to be recruited to play by the top ten programs as an international you need to be a freak, Jesse Williams of Alabama benches over 600 pounds! (He’s from Australia) If you want to be recruited to play big time D-1 football you need to attend these schools summer camps, in the summers of junior and senior year. If all were equal and you could attend any school I’d go to UMich, USC or UCB. Good luck</p>

7

<p>Jason Garrett- Princeton
Bill O’Brien - Brown (Offered Cleveland Browns HC job)
Jim Schwartz - Georgetown
Bill Belichick - Wesleyan
Mike Tomlin - William and Mary
Greg Schiano - Bucknell</p>

<p>As you can see from this list, it doesn’t matter what college you go to at all. If you include lesser ranked schools probably around 1/2-2/3 of NFL head coaches didn’t even go to big time football schools.</p>

8

<p>You could probably get some immediate playing time at a school like Duke or Rice, and those schools get much more exposure than any FBS schools. For your second option, Stanford is really REALLY solid in football, and if you don’t have much experience with the United States or know you’re particularly better than a ton of recruits here, you may be sorely disappointed with your results. You may not quite understand how much time US students put into sports to actually get to the level of national recognition: yes, there’s a ton of natural ability that plays in, but you also have almost all participating students putting in 3-4 hours a day starting in spring and ending in late fall in many programs. I know two people going to Alabama to play football and they’ve been insanely gifted since middle school, but they also play sports pretty much all the time (while you may be studying or doing a hobby, they’d be playing basketball or football or even running track/cross-country). You may be better than a bunch of students and have the opportunity to play here, but you may also dedicate your time to a lot more than football with your academics. Is that a reason not to try to get into Stanford or Notre Dame for football? Of course not. But you may want to contact a few recruiting organizations to see where you stand before you end up possibly pursuing the wrong school. The thing about coaching you also have to keep in mind is that it’s possible to rise to the top from really any school, but you’d have to spend a ton of time around lower programs to do so. Either you need to go to a really strong academic program or a really strong playing program to maximize your chances there, but as long as you’re qualified to coach it’s more about what you accomplish as a coach at a high school or as an assistant at a college than where in particular you go.</p>

9

<p>One step at a time. This is much the same as a 15-year old American kid who is a star on his local club soccer team planning to go to England in a few years and play and/or coach for Manchester United or Arsenal. It’s nice to think big. I admire ambition. But like I said, one step at a time.</p>

<p>There are over 42,000 high schools in the US and pretty much all of them have a football team. And top players on all those teams probably dream of playing for a big-time D-1A university and hopefully the NFL. Only the cream of the cream actually make it. So before you buy your Stanford or Notre Dame sweatshirt you need to figure out whether you can actually successfully play the game against the top US high players that you will be competing with for spots on the college teams.</p>

<p>A few questions:

  1. Which colleges are recruiting you? From what level? D-I? D-III?, NAIA?
  2. Have you ever played football in the US, on an exhibition tour or something?
  3. If not, how did you come to the attention of US coaches? I doubt that many colleges can afford to send scouts to scour the all the towns of Britain for talent, so you must have come to their attention some other way.</p>
10

<p>2012 NFL draft picks by college conference:</p>

<ol>
<li>SEC 42</li>
<li>Big Ten 41</li>
<li>ACC 31</li>
<li>PAC-12 28</li>
<li>Big 12 26</li>
<li>Big East 12
6… Mountain West 12</li>
<li>WAC 11</li>
<li>Conference USA 10
10 MAC 8</li>
</ol>

<p>Others: Sun Belt 6, Independents 4, Big Sky 3, Southern 3, SWAC 3, Big South 2, Lone Star 2. Fourteen additional conferences had 1 apiece.</p>

<p>The odds of a college football player ending up in the NFL are extremely long, even in conferences like the SEC and the Big Ten. Each football program averages 25 scholarship recruits per year, plus a few walk-ons (non-scholarship players). With 12 teams in the SEC, that means a minimum of 300 players per year cycling through SEC football programs, and probably quite a few more because many don’t last through 4 years of college eligibility and their scholarships go to additional recruits above the 25 otherwise permitted. So you’ve got to figure fewer than 1 in 7 SEC players will get drafted. Not all those who are drafted will ultimately make an NFL roster; on the other hand, some players go undrafted but sign as free agents. To have any realistic shot at the NFL, you’d need a top football program in a top conference to think highly enough of you to award you one of its 25 coveted football scholarships; you’d then need to compete for and win a starting position, and play well enough to be one of the top handful of players in the nation, and probably the best in your conference, at that position. And not get injured. It doesn’t happen to many of the thousands who try.</p>

<p>By the way, while 6’3" and 230 is big for a HS sophomore, it’s quite small for a big-time college football program. Maybe you’ll keep growing. Maybe you’ll stay the same size, but if you have great reaction time, quickness, great lateral movement, and you can hit like a ton of bricks, you might fit in at linebacker. Here are the sizes of national champion Alabama’s starting offensive and defensive lines and linebackers.</p>

<p>OL: 6’6" 311; 6’3" 320; 6’5" 302; 6"3" 303; 6’6" 335</p>

<p>DL: 6’4" 282; 6’4" 320; 6’3" 286</p>

<p>LB: 6’2" 245; 6’2" 232; 6’3" 245; 6’6" 248</p>