If some of the schools mentioned would move to the Ivy League, I imagine their admissions standard for athletes would have to change a bit, as well. I don’t think some would be willing to do that just to be a part of the Ivy League.
Can you imagining OSU football playing any of the Ivies?! Oof.
The implosion of the Pac12 is sad for OSU, more so than WSU, IMO. I guess they could still end up in Big10 or Big12, but it seems more likely they are destined for a non-Power 4 conference.
It was a ludicrous thought - but the entire chain is kind of ludicrous because the Ivy would never expand - so one could dream.
The Ivy League conference as a whole cares about football. Football is the highest revenue sport in the conference, as well as the sport that the conference allows the most flexibility in admission standards (band system). Football in the Ivies is obviously not as popular as FBS teams appearing in televised games each week and competing for the national championship. However, they still have popular games that sell out, and well known rivalries such as the Harvard-Yale game, which is broadcast on ESPN. Alumni groups have viewing parties for the game. Some example revenue numbers are below, from a recent year.
Highest revenue Div I sports at Harvard :
- Football – $4 Million
- Basketball – $3 Million
- Ice Hockey – $2 Million
- Lacrosse – $1.7 Million
Other Ivies are similar, but the specific order may differ slightly. For example, Cornell is particularly big on ice hockey and nearly surpasses football as the highest revenue sport. I know several Cornell alumni who still closely follow Cornell ice hockey today.
- Football – $3 Million
- Ice Hockey – $3 Million
- Basketball – $2 Million
- Lacrosse – $1.7M
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Shocking 
Hockey does not surprise me. Or Basketball - specially when there is the occasional Cinderella.
I’d be curious on the revenue vs cost. Any ideas? I think Princeton carries something like 130 players? Which is a bit absurd IMO. But I think the whole business of football is absurd, so I am probably not the right person to judge.
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Talking about revenue and expense in Ivy Athletics is a bit like focusing on the free coffee expense at Apple and Amazon. Big numbers at most places, but more about culture and environment than expense.
Sure, but the argument was made that the league cares because it’s the highest earning sport.
I agree with you that athletics as a whole are important at these schools, which is why they will never get rid of recruiting preferences IMO.
Dartmouth was the last LAC to join the Ivy League and it was probably not much bigger than Wesleyan University when it did so (figure ~3000 u/g.)
Revenue tends to be more correlated with student/alumni interest than does overall net profit. A club sport that has extremely low revenue and extremely low expense may be profitable, but that does not mean the sport is “huge” or very important for the university.
However, the university does certainly care about how much money they are gaining/losing on a sport-by-sport basis. One measure that considers a variety of these factors is which sports Ivy League colleges chose to eliminate during/following COVID, when there was less revenue coming in, and colleges had a hemorrhaging athletics budget.
The 11 out of 38 sports Brown eliminated or transitioned to club status were cross country equestrian, fencing, golf, sailing, squash, skiing, and track & field. Dartmouth eliminated golf, lightweight rowing, and swimming. It’s a good variety of different teams, but no Ivy League chose to eliminate the highest revenue (and often higher expense) sports that are more popular with the general population.
By expanding, the Ivy League will get more of that ESPN money.
They have huge endowments. I don’t think they care that much about ESPN revenue.
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Let’s compromise and say it’s the Michigan Institute of Technology.
Some specific inflation adjusted numbers for football are below, from a prior year. In general football tends to be a revenue earning sport, which can help financially support other sports that are not profitable.
Columbia – $6.1 million Revenue, $5.1M Expenses ($1.0M profit)
Yale – $5.3 million Revenue, $4.1M Expenses ($1.2M profit)
Princeton – $4.9 million Revenue, $4.1M Expenses ($800k profit)
Harvard – $4.0 million Revenue, $3.4M Expenses ($600k profit)
All Others – Substantial net profit.
As a comparison to nationally competitive FBS team (not nationally ranked) in the same year, the numbers for Stanford were.
Stanford – $55 million Revenue, $38M Expenses ($17M profit)
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Many of these sports were brought back to full status at Brown, Dartmouth and Stanford. Alumni donations matter.
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CU will make about $4M in profits next Saturday just for the Nebraska game, and that’s just ticket sales, parking, concessions, and merch sales. CU has a pretty small stadium compared to the other Power conference schools.
Ivy leagues can’t pretend to make that kind of money off sports. But they do have other ways of bringing it in.
It’s not as simple as “alumni donations matter.” For example, Brown reinstated track and field and cross country due to what the president described as “implications for efforts to build and sustain diverse and inclusive communities for our students at Brown, and particularly our community of Black students and alumni.” This followed some protests and complaints from students of color groups who felt that eliminating track and field hurt Black students more than other races. I wouldn’t simplify this series of events as “alumni donations matter.”
After Brown re-instated men’s track & field, but not women’s teams, women’s teams brought legal challenges against brown saying that this violated the 1998 Cohen vs Brown gender equity in sports requirements. The article at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/18/brown-will-reinstate-two-womens-teams-title-ix-agreement-end describes Brown reaching a legal settlement with representatives for the athletes that involves ending the 1998 Cohen vs Brown gender equality in sports requirements in exchange for re-instating women’s equestrian and women’s fencing at the varsity level. It doesn’t imply that alumni donations were a factor in the decision.
Dartmouth shows a similar pattern with the same types of challenges and university response. According to the article at Dartmouth reinstates five sports after Title IX concerns - ESPN , Dartmouth reinstated sports, "after the school learned that elements of data used to confirm compliance with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in programs and activities at universities receiving federal funding, may not have been complete. The article also mentions complaints about unfairly targeting sports where Asians are overrepresented. Again it doesn’t imply alumni donations were a factor in the decision.
Perhaps a better summary is when an Ivy League college eliminates a varsity sport, there is likely to be a lot of pushback, particularly from current and former athletes in the sport. There may be protests or legal challenges, and the university may reverse decision to satisfy these groups.
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I was confused for a moment until I realized that you were using “OSU” for Oregon State,…
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Agree with this. For football and basketball, what they care about is competition relative to other Ivies, especially rivalry schools. Every once in a while, a basketball team may advance beyond the first round in the NCAA and are competitive, but that owes to smaller roster sizes. For football, ever since the Ivies were dropped to IAA (now FCS) status, the depth of their recruits has dropped significantly. During my time in college, we had 5 players make it to the NFL, 2 of them having notable careers (Jeff Roher -Cowboys and John Spagnola - Eagles). Don’t see that today, although there was an article about the success Harvard had at putting tight ends into the NFL because of how their offense highlighted that position and therefor attracted top recruits in no less of a publication than the WSJ. Article gifted. Harvard: The Gronk School of Tight Ends - WSJ
I don’t think football is viewed as a moneymaker for Yale (other Ivies) as a sport vs the typical FBS program. It is important as a focal point for alumni donations. The Harvard Yale Game is like Black Friday of year end fundraising. There are even challenges/contests based on which alumni group raises more money for the weeks leading up to The Game.
Somewhat disagree. Originally, its core founding was as a sports conference and that is what it technically is today.
But compared to the brand that it has fostered for other things, the sports aspect of it is a detail. As a sports conference, nobody really cares except for those connected to one or more of the schools. Name recognition, prestige, elite (academically and socially) … those are the things it stands for now.
On that point, I can’t imagine they’d want to tinker with it even a little bit, even for a Chicago or JHU.
Schools like Northwestern, Stanford, Duke and Vandy perform at the P5 level and I don’t think would fit with the current Ivy League athletically. The football games would represent a danger to the Ivy League participants. It’s another level entirely. There are some non-revenue sports in which the Ivy League competes with P5 nicely, but they tend to be more on the fringe except for the occasional upstart Penn or Princeton men’s BB team that will streak a few games into the tournament. Put Stanford, Vandy, NW and Duke in the Ivy League, and the current conference programs would never see a conference title again. Same for football (obviously), baseball, softball, track, etc. Some of the Ivy crew programs compete at the top. Fencing and those kinds of sports would represent an opportunity for the Ivies. But the main sports would be dominated by those four schools. And for what? To upset the delicate balance of the 8 school conference that makes up the strongest brand in higher ed? The only way to compete with those schools athletically would be to lower admission standards for athletes to a level that would cause no small amount of controversy among the power class and would result in institutions that would be hard to recognize from what they are today. And that’s without getting into the topic of facilities. It’s not easy in the P5.
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I thought those letters stood for Swarthmore and Middlebury
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