<p>^ NU games against UW and Iowa are more interesting than the games against Illinois (snore).</p>
<p>Btw, Camp Randall is a great place to take in a FB game (even w/ all the drunk, verbally abusive Badger fans - lol).</p>
<p>Probably should make my way up to Kinnick one of these days considering how successful NU has been there recently.</p>
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<p>Hey, if ND has been “mediocre at best”, then the vast majority of teams would surely like to be mediocre at best. I agree that ND garners bowl games because of its brand name and viewer base, but that only confirms that it possesses the school spirit that the OP requested - the vast majority of teams wish they had that sort of name and viewer base. Keep in mind that the OP’s question is not regarding which school has the best actual sports performance, but rather which school has the best sports school pride, which is more accurately proxied by the strength of the brand. Frankly, ND still has a better brand name in football than Wisconsin has, despite the fact that Wisconsin has had a better recent record. {Let’s face it - if Wisconsin had ND’s brand, they would have garnered far more recent BCS bowl invitations than it did.} </p>
<p>Similarly, if UCLA football has been mediocre at best, then plenty of other schools can only dream of being mediocre at best.</p>
<p>Duke, ND, Stanford, Northwestern. For LAC’s Colgate and Holy Cross both great alumni networks.</p>
<p>@Erin’s Dad…Ooops! I was typing fast and wasn’t thinking. You’re right; I did mean the Director’s Cup! Stanford dominates this list each year, but it’s still interesting to review.</p>
<p>Sakky, if you did a real research you would find actual Badger alums are second to none as fans. What ND has is the large Catholic “subway” alumni who never attended ND but watch TV. Badger fans travel to bowls so well they usually get the nod over higher ranked teams when it comes down to selecting a team. Look at the ESPN and SI stories on best college sports towns. Madison is right at the top.</p>
<p><a href=“http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2003/sioncampus/09/10/top_ten0916/[/url]”>http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2003/sioncampus/09/10/top_ten0916/</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://bleacherreport.com/articles/733276-campus-craze-10-best-college-sportstowns/page/11[/url]”>http://bleacherreport.com/articles/733276-campus-craze-10-best-college-sportstowns/page/11</a></p>
<p><a href=“HugeDomains.com”>HugeDomains.com;
<p>And yes over the last decade UCLA was mediocre. So was ND. Any kid looking at schools today was under 8 the last time either was a real power at all. What is their combined bowl record since 2000?</p>
<p>Syracuse(both football and basketball are good)
SUNY Binghamton(basketball)
USC(football’s good, not sure about basketball)
University of Alabama(football)
Clemson university(football, not sure about basketball)
Ole Miss
UMD-College Park
UDel
UF
Ohio State</p>
<p>University of Pittsburgh</p>
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<p>Uh, Barrons, if you did real research, then you should have been asking yourself why Notre Dame continually garners bowl invitations that they arguably don’t deserve. If Badger fans travel as well as Notre Dame fans apparently do, then they Wisconsin should have invited to far better bowls than they have been. </p>
<p>Your attempts to explain ND’s incessant popularity through the supposed ‘subway alumni’ is frankly irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ND football obtains its popularity. All that matters is they are popular, whether we like it or not. </p>
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<p>Um, at least they get invited to plenty of bowl games, and in the case of ND, often times to BCS bowl games. Plenty of teams wish they could be invited to any bowl game at all, even if they were blown out in them. So if ND and UCLA are, according to your definition, mediocre, then plenty of teams must be clearly far worse than mediocre.</p>
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<p>Uh, what does this have to do with anything? Have I ever disputed the notion that Wisconsin had an interesting college town? Please point to the quote where I specifically said that Wisconsin did not have an interesting college town. Oh wait, you can’t do it? So then why are you even bringing this point up at all? </p>
<p>What I said is that ND is hardly a ‘mediocre’ sports school. How can any school that garnered 3 BCS bowl invites in the last decade alone be considered ‘mediocre’? {You might argue that it is mediocre relative to ND’s glorious gridiron past, but that is true only because ND’s past was indeed truly glorious.} I also said that ND has a better overall football brand name than Wisconsin does, something that I think even the most diehard Wisconsin fan would have to concede, no matter how unfair they may think that is.</p>
<p>“Sakky, if you did a real research you would find actual Badger alums are second to none as fans.” </p>
<p>TOSU’s definition of a “diehard” fan!! lol</p>
<p>[OSU</a> fans take fandom to the grave… and beyond - CBSSports.com](<a href=“http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/24156338/30595862]OSU”>http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/24156338/30595862)</p>
<p>Go Bucks!! :)</p>
<p>laxbrah44, take a look at Clemson! We have gone to a bowl game for football and have made the NCAA basketball and basketball tournament for the last 3 years! The only other team in the country to do that is Florida State. </p>
<p>We also have great academics. We have the #22 public university in the country. Our business program is ranked #29 among public universities so business is a solid program at Clemson. In the US News ranked, we were ranked #9 among up-and-coming schools and #12 for our dedication to undergraduate teaching. We are consistently ranked in The Princeton Review’s list as the happiest students (we were #5 this year).</p>
<p>If you have any questions about Clemson definitely let me know! I’m a junior there majoring in civil engineering.</p>
<p>^ What? Most people will say Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc. shouldn’t be on the list, but we can at least say they are reasonably good academically. But Clemson? No. Not at all. </p>
<p>Schools like tOSU and Penn State are at least good at sports even though their academic programs are a joke. But Clemson isn’t even good at Football, its most popular sport.</p>
<p>The last post is the joke.</p>
<p>excuse me informative? how dare you insult my school like that. I am getting a great education thank you.</p>
<p>Let’s take a look at the US News rankings</p>
<h1>53 Florida</h1>
<h1>56 Maryland</h1>
<h1>56 Georgia</h1>
<h1>56 Purdue</h1>
<h1>56 OHIO STATE</h1>
<h1>63 Texas A&M</h1>
<h1>64 CLEMSON</h1>
<h1>64 Rutgers</h1>
<h1>64 MINNESOTA</h1>
<h1>64 Pittsburgh</h1>
<h1>64 WPI</h1>
<h1>69 Northeastern</h1>
<h1>69 Connecticut</h1>
<h1>69 Virginia Tech</h1>
<h1>72 Iowa</h1>
<h1>75 Indiana</h1>
<h1>79 Michigan State</h1>
<p>Yeah, Ohio State is significantly better than Clemson and Clemson is so much worst than Minnesota or some of the Big 10 schools. Please…take your big 10 bias somewhere else!</p>
<p>Also tOSU and PSU are academically solid schools. I’m not sure what the heck you’re talking about. What a joke.</p>
<p>And by the way, we had a terrible season last year but we should be better now that we got rid of that joke of a quarterback Kyle Parker (and we’re implementing the Gus Malzahn offense this year so that should be interesting). We made it to the ACC Championships the year before last (heard of a guy called CJ Spiller who was in the running for the heisman?)</p>
<p>Ok, end of rant. That post got me pretty fired up haha</p>
<p>Reading comprehension. I said tOSU and PSU are significantly better at FOOTBALL, not academically. Though I was suprised to see tOSU ahead of Clemson academically anyways.</p>
<p>maybe you need some of that reading comprehension yourself because my paragraph about tOSU and PSU was not in comparison to Clemson, it was in reference to your quote that “Schools like tOSU and Penn State are at least good at sports even though their academic programs are a joke.” I dare you to find 10 people on this board that will agree that tOSU and Penn State’s academic programs are a joke.</p>
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<p>This is a decent list but needs some editing. Stanford is not a football power by any reasonable definition of the term and needs to prove itself on the field for another 5 years or so by getting to BCS bowls at least 2-3 more times during that period to cement its status as en elite football program. The school currently has zero signature programs in the 5 most important sports in college sports (football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse and hockey).</p>
<p>Duke has elite College Basketball and Lacrosse programs.</p>
<p>Texas is the king of college sports (Football, Basketball and Baseball) but it doesn’t have “top-notch academics”. Even the most academically egalitarian adults I know would never lump UT with Duke or Stanford. Also, I disagree that UIUC and UW-Madison has “top-notch academics”. Wisconsin, Texas and Illinois aren’t academic peers of Berkeley, Duke or Stanford.</p>
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Madison lacks a signature college sports program besides hockey though. They don’t have the storied football tradition of Notre Dame or Michigan and the storied basketball tradition of Duke and UNC.</p>
<p>Are we talking history of today’s sports landscape? Very few schools have the traditions of UM or ND football but today UW is as good or better. UW basketball is as good as Texas and pretty much anyone not Duke, Kansas, UNC and maybe UCLA. UK does not count because of their extreme level of cheating. And the UW players are actually students and not 1 and done hired guns. Since Barnes came to UT they have very similar records. UW beat Duke last year and split a recent series with UT. </p>
<p>I don’t know what is meant by “top notch academics” but most UW programs are in the Top 10-20 range, it is in the Top 3 for research, and produces leaders in many fields without the benefit of being a smaller highly selective private. If that is not top notch enough you have the issues. It competes with the schools named by the OP. Not many schools compete with Stanford head to head.</p>
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I’m talking about a weighted combination of current success and historical achievement/pride. If Michigan or Notre Dame don’t make a BCS bowl in the next 10 years, then they are no longer elite programs in my eyes. That’s basically what happened to Indiana Basketball. They used to be a top 5 basketball program several decades back but years of mediocrity have relegated the Hoosiers to college basketball purgatory where their achievements in the modern era don’t match up to their accomplishments during the reign of Bobby Knight.</p>
<p>All the Badgers are missing in College Football and Basketball are championships to be honest. Its hard to pin Wisconsin as an elite program in the two major sports when it has zero BCS national championships and zero NCAA national championships in the modern era.</p>
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I’m not talking about the strength of the academic departments or research output; I consider selectivity, undergraduate resources, financial resources/endowment size per capita, student body strength, placement into top jobs, fellowship production (Rhodes, Marshall, etc.), placement into top professional/graduate programs, study abroad opportunities, etc. etc. to be far better indicators of university prestige rather than nebulous graduate rankings that don’t apply to undergraduates. With these factors in mind, Wisco is far behind Berkeley or Michigan and a mile behind Duke or Stanford in the academics category.</p>
<p>Just throwing this out there but the Chicago Cubs don’t have a MLB championship in a LONG time. But Wrigley Field is probably one of the best places to watch a baseball game and they have a large fan base. Championships isn’t always the factor (in reference to comments about wisconsin and other schools)</p>
<p>Top jobs like Fortune 500 ceos? Do you even know the total value of UW’s endowments (yes more than 1) because I doubt you do. How many even applied to the few grad schools listed in that old article that does not even include PhD programs. UW is in the top 8 for undergrads earning Phds in sciences and engineering well ahead of Duke, Northwestern, UCLA and others.</p>
<p>"Wisconsin stood out among its state school peers, granting 17 degrees to the CEOs, which put the school fourth overall, despite having an average U.S. News rank of 33 for the school’s undergraduate, business, and law programs. In the Fortune analysis, Wisconsin finished ahead of highly ranked schools like Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Northwestern University. "</p>
<p>[Where</a> the Fortune 500 CEOs Went to College - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2011/01/03/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-college]Where”>http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2011/01/03/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-college)</p>