<p>I’m saying that part of the reason for keeping a large stable of teams in sports of the affluent is to counterbalance the lower-SAT working class staples of football, basketball and hockey. There was a long Crimson article some years ago, linked here many times, on Harvard athletic admissions that detailed some of the calculus for the Academic Index quota on the larger and lower-SAT sports, particularly football. So the short answer to your question is “yes”.</p>
<p>It should also be noted that the low-SAT sports involve a similar twofold calculation: recruiting the better athletes for those teams not only improves the school’s win-loss record, it is a means for artificially increasing the racial, economic and geographic diversity measures.</p>