Full disclosure, I get pretty chippy pretty quick when people attack wrestling or programs get cut. They also recruited my son, but he decided to go elsewhere. We talked about that the day it happened, and what S would have done if he was at Stanford. There aren’t many good options for those kids. Cornell, Penn, Princeton and Northwestern you could still wrestle on a similar level and get similar academics. Beyond that, you are probably going to make a serious drop in either the athletic level or academic one. They have a couple of guys on the team right now who are potentially national champion caliber. As an aside, the one I have talked to personally I thought was a nice kid too. That’s a really horrible choice for them, especially if they can’t get into one of those 4 I listed above.
Wrestling was almost dropped from the Olympics partially because of participation on the women’s side and them trying to have more gender equality. The sport has been growing pretty rapidly worldwide on the women’s side since then, including in the US. I am still unhappy that it was almost lost rather than something like modern pentathalon, but it was a bit of a wake up call. Wrestling was pretty corrupt on the international level frankly. That still isn’t what it should be, but it is much better. They also made quite a few changes to scoring that generate a lot more action and made it a more spectator friendly sport. I would be surprised if it ends up on the chopping block again. It is in a much better position than it was. Those were the main 3 issues and they are all in a completely different position than they were then.
BTW, the Olympic styles have some similarities to college wrestling, but they are quite a bit different. Greco Roman is probably about as similar to college wrestling as cricket is to baseball.
Wrestling definitely doesn’t favor wealthy and white. A pretty high percentage of the kids come from working class households, or maybe one generation removed at most. Lots of hispanic participation in particular, I think. I haven’t seen numbers on that just my observation from following the sport pretty closely for several years. The white kids are probably more likely to have grown up in a trailer park than to have gone to private school.
Stanford can do what it wants, but cutting wrestling hurts diversity, it doesn’t help it. They specifically said with respect to wrestling it was hard to recruit a competitive team because they didn’t have the full scholarships allocated (5 instead of 9.9). My response to that is that Cornell (no scholarships) has finished in the top 10 more consistently than any team in the country other than Iowa.
I have seen speculation that one of the reasons they cut the sports was that it will free up endowment money that is tied to the program. So for example if those 5 scholarships or coaching positions are endowed (and they probably were), then that endowment just will flow to the general fund of Stanford, or at least the income from that endowment money would go to the general fund.
Endowment per student, endowment per faculty and endowment per athlete: Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth are at the bottom end. Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Penn at the top. Stanford, Columbia, Duke, Chicago and MIT somewhere in the middle. These are macro data that limit the flexibility (like a stress test) of each school. This pandemic is the ultimate stress.
Rankings of each sport: If not top 3 or top 5 in NCAA, then it’s a waste of time. I know, someone will say ranking is not everything. But let’s face it, kids work their asses off to get higher ranking in fencing, right? How much funding and bargaining power to recruit that each head coach has is directly correlated to ranking. The conversations among the head coach, the athletic director and the admissions director are about ranking and costs, not kisses and hugs. Of course, a big donor helped too, but that’s history after Operation Varsity Blue (OVB).
Exposure of a school’s brand because brand equals future donations. This is the only qualitative angle. When each school did their internal audit after OVB last summer, they asked only one key question (e.g. Yale in public) - How much exposure do I have to potential corruption versus the brand glory I get from this sport? Sailing, rowing, fencing, tennis, squash, golf, soccer and cross country all looked vulnerable on this simple cost-benefit analysis. Going back to 2), unless the sport ranks top 3 or 5 to impress a future donor, why have it?
I correctly predicted Brown and Dartmouth based on 1) to 3). Stanford came as a semi-surprise but we have no clue how much exposure their endowment had before June 30. Soon in Sep or Oct, we may find out that they lost 25% compared to the other Ivy+ schools’ 15%. Stanford has been heavier on derivatives and energy and maybe they took too big a levered position when energy crashed. I now predict that their endowment performance must be really bad on a relative basis to have pushed them to drop 11 sports this early, to announce re-opening plan on June 3, the earliest among all top schools, and to begin taking in wl kids prior to May 1 (something they never did, like ever).
At this moment, I predict Cornell would be next based on the above framework (assuming Title IX can be circumvented).
@dadof4kids Admittedly, I’m biased, but I’d add Michigan. Large endowment, top ranked academic programs (engineering, business, 40+ Top 10 LSA programs) and a ranked wrestling team. :grimace:
Big structural factor for Stanford is the relatively poor PAC 12 revenue share. When they did the search for a new Track director last year, they lost a lot of candidates because the salary range and budget was significantly lower than comparable positions elsewhere. Their athletic budget just wasn’t sustainable.
I don’t think varsity blues plays much of a role in these decisions. Most have tightened up procedures if needed, and it was a blind spot at some schools for sure. But the idea that sports are eliminated because they represent a risk of corruption is pretty far fetched in my opinion.
@sushiritto The wolverines have the third largest public university non-pension endowment in 2019 ($12.5B) after UT ($22.6B) and UC ($13.4B). However, their NCAA Div1 teams are not funded the same way the IVY+ schools are. They already don’t have niche sports to drop. But I agree with you that academically UM, Cal, UCLA, UVA and UT Austin are definitely on the level with the top Ivy elites. Sports? State schools lead by a mile. Most Ivy schools don’t even come close…
@LimboKid Cornell might be next to drop a sport(s) but I doubt they will drop wrestling. It’s one of the sports that Cornell competes on a national level - if not as a team, then with individual champs. Plus, the AD is the former wrestling coach.
So - we all love sports. But I’d say big $ athletics has a less-than-benign impact on the academic mission of colleges. When will owners of professional teams create and fund minor leagues to foster the development of their players (like the rest of the world). I don’t think it’s likely b/c the billionaire owners know a good deal (ie free minor leagues in the Big 10 and ACC and PAC10 etc) when they see it. But I wouldn’t mind the sports landscape moving that direction.
@LimboKid I may be missing something, but every listing that I’ve seen has UMich as the #2 public endowment, with obviously less campuses and students.
I mentioned UMich, since they have a wrestling team and it’s also ranked at #22. I don’t think the other state schools you mentioned have D1 wrestling programs.
A couple questions, why do you say UMich doesn’t have niche sports to drop? They have a top ranked rowing team, wrestling, gymnastics, cross country, field hockey, etc. I assume if the economic environment became worse, they could drop some of these niche sports.
Sorry, I wasn’t aware that UMich has that many Div1 niche sports. I only knew about field hockey and gym. Thought the others were clubs only.
I sourced UM and UC endowments directly from their school reporting in 2019. My UT number was too low. According to Yale Daily, they already surpassed Yale in 2019 as USA #2, right behind Harvard’s $40B.
The markets improved a lot since 2016, so even if you look at 2018 numbers, UC was still behind UM, but not anymore. I bet COVID will reshuffle everyone, so maybe UM will become #2 again. Won’t know until Oct the earliest.
@LimboKid Aren’t you comparing UMich Ann Arbor versus the entire UT and UC systems?
From that press release:
Either way, I mentioned it way back whimsically since the academics are on or about on par with the Ivy’s, they have a ranked D1 wrestling team and a large endowment.
This whole paragraph is IIRC, it’s too late for me to bother looking any of it up. But I’m pretty sure it’s all correct. As a team they were ranked #2 and #3 in the 2 preseason rankings I saw for the 2020-2021 season, with no seniors projected to start. They are the only team besides Iowa to finish top 10 at the NCAA tournament the last 12 years. I believe the current coach has led them to national runner up on 2 different occasions. So while they have individuals competing for national championships, they are also in the hunt for the team trophy as well.
In wrestling the training for world teams and world medals is tied in pretty closely with the colleges. Cornell has had multiple recent athletes make world teams and win medals for the US. They have an alum who is a favorite to make the 2021 Olympic team, and a couple current students with a decent chance to make the Olympic team as well. I think that gives the wrestling program even more protection. Any school but especially I think the Ivies like to see an Olympic medalist on campus.
@dadof4kids Not a big wrestling fan, but isn’t Penn State the “dynasty” in wrestling the last decade-ish? But for last year, they won the previous 8 national championships.
Regarding Cornell cutting some athletics teams:
It could happen. It has happened before. When I attended I had a (male) roommate who was on the fencing team. At some point later, men’s fencing was demoted to a “club”. IIRC.
I doubt they would cut: hockey, lacrosse, wrestling, some track and field sports.
Wrestling has a separately-endowed facility, IIRC separately-endowed coach’s salary, other specifically-earmarked alumni donations. sparked by the facility endowment by an ex-wrestler alum who had been co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. The Stanford example suggests this could make the program more susceptible to cuts, to get to their endowment money, but I don’t know if the gifts are written that way and there would likely be alumni backlash.
FWIW Cornell also has : an extensive program of intramural athletics; a two-semester PE requirement for all its undergraduate students, towards which it offers a large number of courses students can elect; and a swimming proficiency requirement. Coaches are also employed in these other non-varsity endeavors.
Usually when people raise “endowment per student” I like to point out that Cornell is divided into the Endowed Division and the Statutory Division. The latter gets funding from New York State which substitutes for some of the purposes that endowments are typically used for at the other schools that are not partially funded by any state. However in this case, there is no doubt New York State’s budget is being trashed by the pandemic, which may well have funding implications.
Penn State definitely is the current powerhouse. They didn’t win 2015 because the redshirted all of their studs to stack for the future. I think Iowa is a huge favorite this year though.
My point was that if you look at the last decade and make a list of the top 5 teams for consistently being in the mix, Cornell is on most everyone’s list. Plus they are stacked for at least the next 2 years, probably longer. They have the deepest bench they have ever had.
Imagine what happens when thousands of kids from CA, FL and TX descend upon the 35 colleges in the Greater Boston area or 75+ colleges in the Greater New York City area. They might as well test who doesn’t have the virus by October. The schools can control whatever happens on campus. But unless they lock us up like in real prisons, there’s no way for any control or monitoring of who goes where to see/make friends. From a few news reports, some summer school kids are holding parties to celebrate getting the virus so now they have immunity to do whatever they want. Maybe my mom is right, a ticking virus time bomb this fall…
Most of those 35 Boston schools are not having athletics this fall. At some schools, particularly Power 5 football, the athletes are already back on campus.
@monydad My all-time fav wrestling story is about the Cornell wrestler who spoke about losing to a girl when he was 12. He pretended he couldn’t move after getting pinned. The medics came out and had the board etc and finally his mother walked up and said, “Gabe, get up”. Pretty sure he won the championship that year.
Sorry to digress but figure wrestling and Cornell wrestling doesn’t get a lot ton of bytes here.