Football

Parents Forum
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<p>For an excellent read on football in the ivies and other select colleges, look at <a href="http://www.johntreed.com%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.johntreed.com&lt;/a>. Yes, he is opinionated, but much of his info is solid and relevant.</p>

<p>Playing Division 1 footaball at a school that is very serious about the program is a whole different thing from playing for Ithaca College, for instance, or Hobart William Smith, where some of the kids on my son's team are going. Many of the D-3 school that do not give athletic scholarships look heavily on the experience (time played) and commitment a kid has for the sport rather than at specific skill sets. It is difficult for some of these schools to keep a team together, as there is not that much in it for the kids if they do not love the game. Being a NCAA athlete even at the D-3 levels is quite a commitment, and not always compatible with certain programs, majors. I remember visiting my son on a random weekend. He could not meet me for dinner Friday night, as they have a team dinner together after a light practice on Fridays (he was captain then). We saw each other briefly and he went to bed early as he had to get up for a team breakfast before the team bus drove them to another college which was only about an hour or so away. I watched the game and saw S very briefly as they went to a team dinner after the event and then partied heavily afterwards, though son cut out early and joined me at the hotel. I was not as concerned about the lack of time with me as the fact that he was not hitting the books at all during that span, and this was his life during the entire season. Not conducive for good grades. Though his school was generous with the team allowance so much of his food was covered during those events, he, as a team member reciprocated by serving as timer and set up person for other sports event off season without pay. So he had a very full schedule. A number of the athletes felt that their social lives were too limited by the sport and quit after a year or two. Or that it impinged too much on academics. So the commitment and enthusiam for the sport can count heavily in schools where football, or any sport is not such a big deal. The coach weighs in heavily as to how admissions views such candididates and that is a difficult factor to gauge. We found D-1 schools where the coach and the sport had little clout in admissions, and D-3 schools where the coach and the adcoms were buddy-buddy. </p>

<p>For schools where the football program is paying its way and giving the school a positive edge in name recognition and interest, I don't see any problem in giving those athletes an edge in admissions. Football and other athletics can also add a type of diversity to schools in the student types that would otherwise be difficult to attain. Not that schools without a football program are not popular. Wash U ( which I see is all over the CC boards-decisions must have just come out there) and Emory are two schools that come to mind. Ultimately, it becomes the decision that a school has to make. I have always wondered why some of the tech schools or UChicago have maintained a football team when they don't seem to be particularly well supported by either alums, school community or students. I went to a couple of CMU football games when I lived in the area, and they were so poorly attended. In cases like that, I do question the point of the supporting such programs.</p>

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<p>When my H taught at an ivy many years ago, we had a conversation with an older faculty member who had been there for his whole career. He said that because Ivy fields teams in so many sports, they need 100s of athletes to do so. So that the real number of spots for admits that are not set aside for legacies, donors, faculty kids and athletes is really quite small. Which is why we've seen comments on other threads that a middle class kid applying without a hook has such a tiny chance of getting in.</p>

<p>When we were in grad school at Michigan, I remember that football Coach Shembechler (sp?) was very respected because he emphasized getting his players graduated in addition to winning records. And a very high percentage of them did graduate.</p>

23

<p>Tulane went through the same kind of review Rice is going through now two years ago about sports in general and football in particular - the economics, the impact etc etc. At the time they were coming off a fairly successful football year on the field. Most all of the issues in the Rice report were reviewed then and it was noted that a number of other private D1 schools, oarticularly none BCS schools were in the same boat. The decision in that case after much brouhaha was essentially a stay of execution and a mandate that the atheletic department subsidy be down to $2 million a year in five years or else.</p>

<p>Tulane like Rice looked at a lot of peer institutions and the UAA conference in particular which includes WUSTL, Chicago, Emory, Brandeis, Case, and CMU. Even at those schools atheletics runs about $5 million a year with no scholarships, limited competition, and of course virtually no gate revenue. In fact at most of them sports is used more as a recruiting tool than a hook as in hey Johnny come to CMU and you can keep playing football at a competitive level and get a good education. You can't do that at Michigan or Rice or maryland can you?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Many of the D-3 school that do not give athletic scholarships look heavily on the experience (time played) and commitment a kid has for the sport rather than at specific skill sets.

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</p>

<p>Unfortunately, that approach is fast becoming an anachronism, even in Div III. That was the traditional way of fielding a football team. But, even at the Div III level, the sport has now become one of specialization. So, enrolling 60 "football players" is no longer enough to be competive. Now, you have recruit specific positions, for example, a three-year starter at left defensive end in high school. It's one thing to find a "football player" with decent academic qualifications. It's a different matter when the search becomes increasingly narrow: a 280 pound left tackle with 1250+ SATs. </p>

<p>And, when you find one, why in the world would he enroll at a Division III school when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are fighting over him and will recruit kids with lower academics than the top LACs because it's easier for them to bury a few dozen low-stat football players in the noise?</p>

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<p>It has been my experience that athletic talent provides a means for a "borderline" candidate to gain admission to a top LAC or other top tier Division III school. I define a borderline candidate as a student who may be accepted without athletics, not a low-stat football player.</p>

<p>When my son was being recruited for D-3 teams, he met quite a few members of D-3 teams that turned down Ivy League schools to attend a highly selective D-3 school. There are reasons to turn down Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc. By the way, these schools are 1-AA schools in football, a major step below Division 1.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
It has been my experience that athletic talent provides a means for a "borderline" candidate to gain admission to a top LAC or other top tier Division III school. I define a borderline candidate as a student who may be accepted without athletics, not a low-stat football player.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Most LACs and top Div III schools have both categories -- "borderline" students who get a nod over equally qualified students because of athletics and recruited athletes who don't come close to meeting the standards of the school and who would never be admitted without athletics. </p>

<p>Most of the latter recruits are concentrated in football, basketball, and ice hockey. All of the other sports at top schools featurely mostly students who range from plausible to solid candidates for admission based on academics alone. This is why football is such a contentious issue in elite college admissions: it devours a limited supply of low-stat slots that would be distributed among a much larger group of sports.</p>

<p>There is a third category: recruited athletes who have excellent academic records. Notwithstanding the impression they may leave with the student, the coaches do NOTHING to help these kids gain admission. Why waste a slot on a kid who can get admitted without one?</p>

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<p>I read the Rice report (DD is a freshman there), and I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they chose to continue in Division I. A school with 2800 undergrads is too small to field a football team. If they just dropped football all together and spent some of that money on recruiting URM they'd save a lot of money. Maybe they were reluctant to make too many changes when a new President was coming in.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they chose to continue in Division I.

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</p>

<p>Because football is the "third rail" of American education. Sacrosanct. The colleges don't have guts to make changes because they know the alumni would go berserk.</p>

<p>Heck, it came to light early this year that the Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth sent a letter to the Pres. of Swarthmore five years ago supporting his decision to drop football. In the letter, he stated that any honest admissions professional at an elite school understands the compromises inherent in football recruiting.</p>

<p>Over this five year old letter, the Dartmouth alumni have called for the guy's head. It got so bad, the Pres of Dartmouth had to trot him out and make him publicly apologize to the university and issue a statement about how wrong he was to speak ill of football and how great it is to accept kids with SATs 400 or 500 points below Dartmouth's average. BTW, Dartmouth has a cumulative record in Ivy League football of about 7-53 in recent years. They have no prayer of fielding a competitive team.</p>

<p>Wouldn't it be just as easy to go recruit the top academic student at a high school in Watts as recruit the star running back?</p>

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<p>I know exactly why they continued, anxiousmom - a whole lot of alums who are now rich and donating went to Rice in the 50's when football was great and important. The Superbowl was even played in Rice stadium in the 50s! Lots of them declined to continue donating if the sports went to div. III. And so, Rice would lose even more money than they lose by fielding the sports if they stopped. </p>

<p>Also, the sports bring some level of recognition. Apps jumped a whole lot after baseball won the national championship in 2003. This increases selectivity, increases rankings, and also indirectly increases endowment and general excellence.</p>

<p>I don't mind that we kept being Div. I. I really don't. But you would think that if we are letting in all these football players with bad stats, they should at least be good football players! Lol, kind of.</p>

<p>Re: the stat about filling the stadium: Rumor on campus is that not only would the stadium not be filled if all LIVING alums and all students went to a game, it wouldn't be filled if all alums, LIVING AND DEAD, and all the students went! But it is a VERY large stadium, which I personally think they should tear down (and use Reliant Park instead).</p>

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<p>
[quote]
But you would think that if we are letting in all these football players with bad stats, they should at least be good football players!

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<p>Look at the chart in the Rice report on what Stanford and Notre Dame spend on athletics relative to other good academic schools. Rice has no prayer of fielding a competitive Div I football team.</p>

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<p>Oh well, it's still fun to go to the games, even when we lose. :)</p>

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<p>"Wouldn't it be just as easy to go recruit the top academic student at a high school in Watts as recruit the star running back?"</p>

<p>Presummably a school with Dartmouth's resources could do both. However there is no guarantee that the top academis recruit in Watts won't have scored 400 points below the Dartmouth average. I live in one of the wealthiest counties in the country, a suburb of Washington, DC. We have a school system among the best in the country with 140,000+ students. It will graduate more than 10,000 students this year and send score of students to the Ivy league. The system is is 22% Black. An article I just read in the paper said there were just 43 Black students who score over 1300 on the SATs last year. What do you think you will find in Watts?</p>

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<p>Right. I think we can all agree that there are serious motivation and community disincentives to academic success in the Af-Am population.</p>

<p>So look at it from the perspective of young black males, say grade school kids, looking up at the role models. Who do these fancy colleges (i.e. hope for upward mobility) pluck out their community? The kids who study hard and get the best grades? Nope. They swoop in and take the football player.</p>

<p>Football = opportunity
Academics and being smart = ????</p>

<p>What's the lesson to the grade school kid looking up for guidance?</p>

<p>Seems like a mixed message from institutions that are supposed to be the champions of academic success.</p>

<p>It's easy to say that this college or that college should be able to afford to do both. But, I only know no more than a half dozen universities that can truly operate without regard to budget and cost.</p>

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<p>"There is a third category: recruited athletes who have excellent academic records. Notwithstanding the impression they may leave with the student, the coaches do NOTHING to help these kids gain admission. Why waste a slot on a kid who can get admitted without one?"</p>

<p>I-Dad: I thank you for recognizing that class of recruited athelete that my son fell into last year. His stats -- in all areas -- placed him in the running for every elite school in the country. Yet, football tipped the balance for him at severa to LACs and mid-sized Uni's that might not have taken such a close look at him had he not been a recruited athlete.</p>

<p>I do not disagree with you that in this third catergory the coah does not need to use a slot for a kid like my son. But I do disagree that the coach's input does not tip the scales. Let's face it, when faced with two identical kids from a grade persepctive -- one with someone internally pushing for his/her admission and another without that push, admission is going to keep its coaching staff happy.</p>

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<p>You are right but if you assume that a school that doesn't have a football team will recruit in Watts is a pretty tall leap of faith. Most likely they will come to Montgomery county and fight over those 43 Black kids already getting 1300+ on their SATs and most likely Mom and Dad are already doctors or lawyers or well paid civil servents. Darthmouth will be competing with harvard and Princeton and Stanford and Duke for young Kwesi and will go through maouth contortions to determine he has mamouth financial need that they would never see if his eyes slanted.</p>

<p>The competition for the limited resource of qualified URMs will and has led to the same kinds of mendacious and hypocritical double speak as the fight for good atheletes.</p>

<p>Anyway everybody forgets that the Ivy League is an atheletic conference first. Dartmouth couldn't drop football unless they could get the rest of the Ivy's to go along with the decision without dropping out of the conference. Dartmouth without the Ivy imprimatur would loose its competitive advantage and find itself in Tufts shoes - just another good and expensive NE school and not in a particularly desirable location.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
But I do disagree that the coach's input does not tip the scales. Let's face it, when faced with two identical kids from a grade persepctive -- one with someone internally pushing for his/her admission and another without that push, admission is going to keep its coaching staff happy.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>My sense from reading about athletic slots at Swarthmore, Williams, and Dartmouth is that there is less of this informal push by coaches for high-stat recruits than there used to be. Basically, all of the interested parties (coaches and adcoms) got so sick of the informal system that they all just said to the administration: "tell us the number of slots you want to set aside for athletic recruits and where you want to draw the line on academics". The coaches fill those slots with a great deal of independence. To be sure, athletics can still give the nod to a high-stat varsity prospect like your son, but it's more of a seat-of-the-pants adcom call, just like whatever nudge my daughter got from her community service. </p>

<p>At schools where athletics has a very high institutional priority, the adcoms are obviously going to tilt that direction more often. At schools where athletics is lower on the priority list, they may tilt the other way. For example, Williams does not end up with 40% of their students playing on varsity sports teams without a lot of adcom "tilting". Adcoms at a different kind of college might be inclined to tilt in other directions, perhaps favoring the diversity of experience that comes from admitting an equally well-qualified student with female names in both of the Parent lines on the application.</p>

<p>Patuxent:</p>

<p>I could not agree more with your "rant on Kwesi, Jr". To me, the frustration with the affirmative action system is that outbidding each other for the same handful of kids makes the colleges feel all warm and fuzzy like they are actually contributing to a solution to the problem. They aren't. </p>

<p>At elite colleges with the most long-standing and aggressive affirmative action programs, African-American enrollment is lower today than it was 30 years ago. They haven't expanded their recruiting base, so "their" handful of students are now being divvied up among more colleges.</p>

<p>The frustrating thing is that there are probably URM kids from public schools all over the country who could get great deals from these elite colleges if they only had any idea...and if they had one mentor to steer them along through high school. Nobody seems to grasp the opportunities.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
The Superbowl was even played in Rice stadium in the 50s!

[/quote]

challenge!!! LOL</p>

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<p>You caught me! But it was an honest mistake, I promise. The stadium was built in the 50s, but the superbowl was not played there until 1974.</p>

<p>Other interesting things that have been hosted in Rice Stadium - JFK's speech about why we should send astronauts to the moon, and a Pink Floyd concert.</p>

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<p>They are beginning to get those deals.</p>

<p>Through the last few months, I began to wonder more and more why Ivy League coaches weren't down here in the South actively pursuing athletes, especially football, but also swimming, baseball/softball and a few other sports that are particularly strong down here. Well they are, it is not just overly publicized yet. Close to 70% of the boys at my kids school play football - now certainly most are not good enough to play in college, even DIII or Ivy League, but some are, and some have the grades to go with it - multiply that by dozens of small schools and larger public schools in the South, and you have to have a resource for players.
We have 2 players in our city - one white, one black - signed by the same Ivy League school (I guess someone up North is thinking the way I am). Academically, they actually published the public school boy's ACT score (by the way, he is white, but from "up the country" as we say) in the newspaper, which I didn't agree with, so I won't repeat, but he is in line to be sal at his high school (3-400 graduates). The Af-Am young man attends the OTHER private school, my kids' school's big rival, by report he is a bright young man, who while not sal at this more rigorous school, is doing well - his parents are not doctors or lawyers either.</p>

<p>There is no point to these anecdotes, other than I know from word of mouth and newspaper reports, that neither of these young men has test scores down in the 1100 range. I also wonder about their high school records and test scores predicting their chance of success - if they had not played football and been able to spend more time with academics, or if they had lived in an area where college admissions is a blood sport, how would they have fared?</p>

<p>I have no problem with Swat's choice, I think other smaller schools may be forced into the same decision, and some may make that decision for philosophical reasons without too much "forcing". I'm glad though, there still are schools that want to continue football, even if it plays havoc with their admit statistics, particularly if it does NOT play havoc with the graduation statistics - some kids do want a choice of a more traditional college experience.</p>

<p>By the way, the 2 guys I spoke of? They are headed to that school that is 7-53, they do not have SATs that are 400-500 points below the average (200 maybe, if they even took the SAT), and I'm very glad that young Mr. Williams is going to be on "our" side now, rather than running up and down the field against us as he has for the last four years ;).</p>

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<p>Does it help any kid in admission if the kid plays football for school since junior high? Kid has the top grades and has 1500 plus in SAT I and along with 800 in all sat II. Just curois</p>