<p>OK Bay, do you REALLY think any Ivy League football team would stand a chance against Oregon’s team? Or USC? Or even Stanford? really??</p>
<p>Here’s mens basketball: [NCAA</a> Division I Men’s Basketball Rankings - NCAA.com](<a href=“http://www.ncaa.com/rankings/basketball-men/d1/ncaa_mens_basketball_rpi]NCAA”>http://www.ncaa.com/rankings/basketball-men/d1/ncaa_mens_basketball_rpi)</p>
<p>Harvard and Princeton ranked way ahead of Stanford,pffffft…</p>
<p>menloparkmom,
The Ivies do not play in the same football division as Oregon, Stanford and USC. Btw, what is Stanford’s excuse for not being no. 1 in every sport? ;)</p>
<p>menloparkmom, I think this is how the AI is calculated:</p>
<p>[Calculating</a> the Ivy League Academic Index](<a href=“http://home.comcast.net/~charles517/ivyai.html]Calculating”>http://home.comcast.net/~charles517/ivyai.html)</p>
<p>
I don’t know if you are trying to diss Ol Miss or the Ivys, but that so did not work.</p>
<p>Mind you it was probably only a question of how much better they (Caltech) were at fencing than football. :)</p>
<p>Bay, I am not assuming anything. I am starting by considering an individual (#1) who is “a recruited athlete, academically qualified for HYPS-whatever.” Then, I am comparing the chances of the recruited athlete to the chances of a person (# 2) who is accomplished at the corresponding national level in a different type of EC, and is academically qualified for the same HYPS-whatever. I don’t think that person #2 has anything like the recruited athlete’s chances. I might be wrong about this, of course, but that’s where CC opinion can support or contradict.</p>
<p>Arguendo, it is equally difficult to become a recruited athlete and to attain the same level of eminence in a different type of EC.</p>
<p>
I want to know exactly how the OP knows that all these other kids are so much more qualified than the kid who got admitted. Are everyone’s test scores and GPAs posted publicly? Maybe the admitted girls just didn’t brag about their scores or grades.</p>
<p>I know a family where the mom is an alumnae and an employee of Princeton. Their son was academically strong and was accepted to some great schools, but Princeton turned him down.</p>
<p>Also, I’m a bit confused by Bay’s post #292. If the HYPS-whatever place doesn’t need a pole vaulter, then I assume that they won’t be recruiting a pole-vaulter, even if the pole vaulter is recruitable. I was writing about academically qualified athletes who are actually recruited. </p>
<p>The narrowness of the situation that I was describing also rules out the person who is not given an offer because there is an even better athlete available for the same spot. I would think then that the athlete who is not quite as good would not be recruited. </p>
<p>On the other hand, maybe the universities in the HYPS category do recruit athletes to whom they do not make offers of admission? I haven’t heard of that. There are two NCAA Div I (serious level, is that I-A?) athletes in my extended family. Everywhere they were “recruited,” they had open offers they could just walk into, and they called the shots. </p>
<p>Also, it seems to me that the situation where a university does not need another individual in the same field (despite a national-level talent) would also apply to someone who plays the bassoon incredibly well.</p>
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<p>If it is anything like the HS I attended, the guidance office probably post a stats list of how many kids were admitted to each college, highest/lowest GPA/board scores, and whether additional lower scores was due to “Special Admit status” as a result of development/legacy, URM, or athletic recruit*. </p>
<p>From all that…considering how obsessive everyone was about elite college admissions, classmates/parents who couldn’t keep their mouths shut about their own(kid(s))/others’(kid(s)) stats, and the fact the most elite university/college admit kids tended to be the most visible/popular kids…wasn’t too difficult to figure out the legacy/developmental admits/URMs considering we’ve all spent 3-4 years together. </p>
<ul>
<li>This practically never happens as with the exception of a few niche sports like fencing, handball, ultimate, cross-country, tennis, or swimming most of our high school athletic teams were widely considered a joke. Keep in mind that the student culture was such that the coolest/popular kids were also what most mainstream kids/parents consider “super-brains/nerds”…especially those on the math/debate teams. On the other hand…our jocks tended to be looked down upon which was unjust as they took the exact same admissions exam as the rest of us.</li>
</ul>
<p>
I agree. The recruited athlete has an advocate, which makes a huge difference.</p>
<p>
It happens all the time. Coaches will make overtures, invite kids on official visits, etc., and decline to make the offer. It’s part of the game.</p>
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<p>Occasionally an Ivy League school will put together a basketball team that’s good enough to make the NCAA tournament. Princeton had a good run, then Cornell had some pretty good teams, now Harvard seems to be doing pretty well. Jeff Sagarin’s computer rankings currently place Harvard #30 in basketball, a pretty strong showing. But it’s rare for the Ivies to have as many as 2 schools in the tournament, and the schools that do make it rarely get beyond the first or second round. The overall level of conference play is not nearly what it is in the big-time basketball conferences. Consider again Sagarin’s computer, which says the next-best Ivy basketball teams after Harvard are #151 Columbia and #160 Yale; then it’s downhill from there. So no, the level of competition and the quality of the athletes in basketball is nowhere near as strong in the Ivy League as in any major basketball conference.</p>
<p>The distance is even greater in football. In basketball, one or two talented players and a hard-working and disciplined supporting cast can go a long way. In football to be a contender you need top-25 or at least top-50 talent at pretty much every offensive and defensive position, plus special teams, plus quality back-ups at all positions. Harvard ran away with the Ivy League title in football this year, going undefeated in the conference and 9-1 overall. Its sole loss was to a mediocre Holy Cross team that plays in the Div I-AA Patriot Leaque. Sagarin’s computer currently ranks Harvard #115 nationally. Next best in the Ivy League is #154 Brown.</p>
<p>So no, Ivy League basketball and football are not big-time. The athletes are athletes, they’ve got real athletic accomplishments, but most wouldn’t make the roster on a middling Big Ten, PAC, or SEC team (and add Big East and ACC for basketball). Those are the sports that garner the most attention, and draw most of the best athletes. The Ivies do much better at sports that are considered “minor” at most schools, or simply are sports where most schools can’t afford to field a varsity team. </p>
<p>I say hurrah for Ivy sports; on balance it’s a good thing, it creates opportunities for athletes in sports that other schools can’t afford, and in sports like football and basketball it reaches down deeper into the talent pool to provide opportunities for intercollegiate competition to some genuine student-athletes, and a few others who are perhaps athletes first. But let’s not kid ourselves about the quality of the competition. Maybe 1 Ivy football player in 10 would even make the team at a big-time football school, and far fewer than that would be starters.</p>
<p>For people who know sports, how do you define being “recruited”? In the two cases I mentioned above, the athletes were ranked in their sports in the state, and had profiles not only on their high school web sites, but on an NCAA-watch type web site. The NCAA site listed the schools that were recruiting the students. There was no question that they could go to any one of those that they chose.</p>
<p>Would being invited out to the university by a coach on an official visit count as being “recruited,” in the same way? To me, it sounds like “looking the student over,” prior to making a decision about recruiting. Is it the coach who is declining to make the offer, in sherpa’s post #310, or the university? I’d consider a student-athlete to be recruited when the coach decided he/she wanted the athlete. </p>
<p>But it’s possible that HYPS, etc. handle things differently. The recruiting schools I know anything about are Sports Illustrated Top 25 in the sport–so the necessary academic qualifications are quite different.</p>
<p>The Ivy League gets an automatic bid to the NCAA basketball tournament every year,regardless of the quality of the teams.</p>
<p>I know that at Stanford a student-athlete has to actually apply and be accepted before the coach is able to make an offer. If they are a recruited athlete, though, they can do that early, I think summer before their senior year.</p>
<p>I disagree with the premise that a student-athlete, no matter how good, can go anywhere they want. I don’t think that’s true for anybody. I follow Uconn women’s basketball closely and I can name a few top-ranked (top five at least in their recruiting class) players whose recruitment was ended by Uconn not making or withdrawing an offer and not the player refusing. This is usually either because as good as the player was, Uconn didn’t see them as someone who would fit into the team dynamic well or because the team is overloaded in that particular recruiting class or position. Someone else accepting an offer first can make it so that another athlete can’t. And this is mostly happening in players’ junior years. So I don’t think anybody is good enough to entirely have their pick of schools.</p>
<p>And yes, at least one Ivy league team will always make the NCAA tournament. On the women’s basketball side, Harvard was the only 16 seed to beat a 1 seed (Stanford) ever in 1998.</p>
<p>To clarify: I didn’t mean that the student-athletes I knew could pick any school whatever. However, I am confident that they could have picked any school among those that were listed as recruiting them (about 5–edit added later: well, it turns out that there were 13 for the taller one).</p>
<p>The lists I was referring to can be found on rivals.com of Yahoo! Sports. There is a ranked list of basketball players, for example, and you can see the school that each has committed to (when that happens). To see the entire list of recruiting schools for a player, there is a “See more” or “See all” option. You can also see checks for “Offer,” dates of visit to the schools, and often the names of the recruiting coach(es). I’ll have to look for an Ivy-bound player to see what that looks like.</p>
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<p>Yes, I have great hopes that they can make it to the men’s NCAA tournament this year, which would be the first time since 1946 and only the second time in the entire history of the school.</p>
<p>Harvard also currently has an alumnus on an NBA team (Jeremy Lin of the Warriors), which is also remarkable since the number of Harvard alums who have ever made it to the NBA over the decades can literally be counted on one hand.</p>
<p>All of which adds up to indicate that there are occasional flashes of success, but year in and year out Harvard basketball is generally pretty lousy I’m sorry to say. Qualifying for the NCAA tournament once every 65 years or so merely confirms the point.</p>
<p>QuantMech, I definitely know what you’re talking about, and I think you’re right, except in those cases where they wait too long to commit and three other people in their class and position commit first (I’d assume that the coach would make the situation clear to all involved from the start in cases like that) or where something happens that actually does cause a coach to drop them. I also don’t think those lists are always 100% accurate because we are talking about decisions that high school kids make and decisions that coaches don’t have to (actually aren’t allowed to) talk to the media about.</p>
<p>I think I do know of cases where schools would appear on those lists without offers being extended, though. Not because an offer wouldn’t but the offer very often would happen the first time the player visited campus or something, but the school was still obviously one that the player was considering. </p>
<p>I think schools like Uconn in women’s basketball or like the ivies for academics deviate quite a bit from the average though. Uconn can afford to be picky and withdraw their offer from a top five player. The ivies are never going to be sports powerhouses and have a ridiculous amount of other considerations. The average school in athletic recruiting is going to look like neither.</p>
<p>And this thread has divulged far from legacy admissions!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Love this.</p>
<p>There are multiple factors that go into recruiting.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Position of the player and seniority- No matter how good, a school will need only so many in a particular position. So if they have 2 liberos who are sophomores, they won’t recruit one more for another year. If one is a senior, they may want to recruit one more to be trained.</p></li>
<li><p>Size and other physical and player attributes- In the same position, each school’s coach determines the ideal type of player needed to fit to the current team. This can change year to year as players and position coaches change. So a defensive football coach or offensive football coach will start changing the personnel to meet their philosophy. A run oriented offense needs different personnel than a pass oriented offense.</p></li>
<li><p>Academics - The level of academics requiired by the school for a specific sport can vary based on what is happening with that sport at that particular time, in their division and team. So in a given year, a team might need a point guard that is a great three point shooter (they have a great center who gets double teamed every game) instead of the the standard set up and assist man. Or the otherway round, they need a cornerback to stop the division rival wide receiver who is stopping them from winning the division. So who cares if the player they have to have is meeting the bare minimum academic requirements?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The AI of a 2300/#1 in class always exceeds 300, so talking about recruited athletes who have “at least 200” is ridiculous and only highlights the intellectual disparity between athletes and regular admits.</p>
<p>It’s fine that coaches can pick and choose between certain positions, so it’s not an “automatic admit” even for top athletes. However, this is means nothing in terms of impact on admissions - the coach has a predefined number of slots EVERY year, regardless of the quality of players. Coaches always use these slots even if they don’t need them for fear that they’ll lose them. You can be sure that the quality of recruited athletes varies from year to year, but every coach will take all of their slots anyway, even if the athletes are “place holders.” </p>
<p>30% of Ivy athletes drop the sport by the end of their sophomore year, so coaches need lots of padding on their rosters.</p>