Scholarship Football Discussion

[eb59]

All,

Just thinking out loud and not trying to start a big thing about Title 9 or anything like that...but in the Modern Age of Focused Attempts to Help All Minorities; especially with Higher Education opportunities.

It's odd to me that basically, the only Non-Scholarship D-1 Football Programs left are the ones from the most academically elite schools in the FCS, with extremely liberal staffs and in most cases the largest endowments of any universities in the country (Not Gtown). Despite all of this, they seem to be actively fighting against the idea of providing 63 Full-Scholarships to their Football teams which have to have a High Minority Ratio by comparison to the overall student body at any of the above schools.

Seems to me like the University Boards for these Elite Universities should be actively reaching out to the Athletic Departments suggesting that before the world wakes up and realizes what some (not me) might argue as a real racial injustice that is happening. Perhaps, if nothing but from a PR perspective - maybe they should really start considering putting in motion full 63 scholarships for all the football programs in the elite....stop fighting it and embrace it as an oppy to really / really help all of the Non-Scholarship Kids in these otherwise D-1 schools.

Thoughts?

[reformation]

Harvard & Yale are basically free for anyone making less than 200K--don't think scholarships would have a lot of impact for minority kids on football team. I doubt financial issuews are a binding constraints for any of the minority kids.

[eb59]

Golden Hoya...to be clear, your opinion is that the Non-Scholarship partial relief (Grant & Aide) from Gtown and the Ivy League does not create added negative financial issues for the kids and their families as opposed to another athlete @ a D1 - Full Ride (Tuition, Books, Meals) + other benefits like I think now a even a stipend potentially?

Not to mention, other important considerations for the kids to consider like IS a non-scholarship player available to the transfer portal and the new NIL stuff???

Regardless, you mention the 2 x of 9 schools in the list that everyone under $200k goes for free...but that is far from the minimum and a Partial at any of these schools still ends up being significant due to their starting price tags of > $50k per year tuition fees. I don't think your argument holds much water...sorry

[reformation]

Most of the ivies have football because of the tradition and exiting sports causes too much friction with the alumni to be worth the saving. They are not in the sport becuase they've done a cost benefit analysis that shows that having a football team + scholarships repesents the most efficient way to promote diversity.

The ivies are in a different position re aid than gtwn--they provide much more significant aid than gtwn does so I would not lump them together as you have.

The specific finacial aid packages for the kids are a function of how much the schools want the specific kids-sure some kids would get better offers with a full scholarship system, but they might be displacing other kids who are minorities or in some way diasdvantaged but not footbal players.

I think the schools take a bigger picture view of how to use aid to promote diversity which certainly includes athletics(not just football). Hard to see what you are advocating makes any sense especially for Gtwn, unless you think we could build a power 5 level program which would allow us to maybe join a better conf get some tv money etc--all seems far fetched

[hoyaguy]

Oct 7, 2021 17:16:27 GMT -5 reformation said:

Most of the ivies have football because of the tradition and exiting sports causes too much friction with the alumni to be worth the saving. They are not in the sport becuase they've done a cost benefit analysis that shows that having a football team + scholarships repesents the most efficient way to promote diversity.

The ivies are in a different position re aid than gtwn--they provide much more significant aid than gtwn does so I would not lump them together as you have.

The specific finacial aid packages for the kids are a function of how much the schools want the specific kids-sure some kids would get better offers with a full scholarship system, but they might be displacing other kids who are minorities or in some way diasdvantaged but not footbal players.

I think the schools take a bigger picture view of how to use aid to promote diversity which certainly includes athletics(not just football). Hard to see what you are advocating makes any sense especially for Gtwn, unless you think we could build a power 5 level program which would allow us to maybe join a better conf get some tv money etc--all seems far fetched

Agreed we are not nearly in the same financial position as them and there just isn't any kind of realistic path that leads out of our weird spot (which is what drives everything here)

[RusskyHoya]

Oct 2, 2021 15:56:22 GMT -5 reformation said:

Harvard & Yale are basically free for anyone making less than 200K--don't think scholarships would have a lot of impact for minority kids on football team. I doubt financial issuews are a binding constraints for any of the minority kids.

This is basically correct... but extends outward beyond HYP to include, to a somewhat lesser but still very real extent, the rest of the Ivy League. Given what that kind of a degree does for one's career earnings prospects... a financial aid package to attend an Ivy, even if there's some loan component to it, offers a far superior return on investment to a full ride to play for the Youngstown State Penguins or the Montana Grizzlies.

Georgetown tries to put forward a similar value proposition with the "4 for 40" credo - 4 years on the Hilltop, with whatever combination of aid, loans, work-study, and loans-bought-out-by-the-program will set you up handsomely for the next 40 years of your life. Certainly more so than taking a scholly at Colgate or Towson, no offense intended to those fine institutions.

That particular pitch is... a work in progress. Maybe having a real locker room to dress in, as opposed to McShane Lounge, will make the sell more credible.

But to the broader conversation: yes, it is absolutely true that one of the reasons why the Ivies (and, following their lead, Georgetown) keep football around is to lock in a certain number of Black men as matriculants. Nothing new or untoward about that. What percentage of women at the service academies do you think participate in intercollegiate athletics? How many liberal arts colleges retain various men's teams in order to keep the gender balance somewhere within spitting distance of 60/40?

[CTHoya08]

I sometimes wonder if the kind of “full-need” packages that the Ivies actually can offer give them an advantage in non-counter sports where they can probably give more aid than schools using the limited scholarships allowed by the NCAA.

[RusskyHoya]

Oct 9, 2021 7:38:31 GMT -5 CTHoya08 said:

I sometimes wonder if the kind of “full-need” packages that the Ivies actually can offer give them an advantage in non-counter sports where they can probably give more aid than schools using the limited scholarships allowed by the NCAA.

Wonder no more - the answer is very much yes. The impact is offset by the whole "you can't just totally blow off academics at these schools" thing - it's a very self-selecting pool. But it certainly explains how the Ivies ended up having some nationally-competitive teams across various non-revenue sports, most visibly lacrosse.

[CTHoya08]

I was sitting here wondering about things like soccer and cross country and had lax staring me right in the face. 🤦‍♂️

[DFW HOYA]

Oct 9, 2021 10:24:32 GMT -5 CTHoya08 said:

I was sitting here wondering about things like soccer and cross country and had lax staring me right in the face. 🤦‍♂️

The Ivy League sits in the midst of one of only two major lacrosse recruiting areas in the nation, but have not been dominant over the last 20 years, as that base has figured out you don't need to go there to have a championship experience and/or a networking tie to remain in the Northeast.

Lacrosse success differs wildly among the Ancient Eight. Despite being in New York, Columbia does not have a varsity team, which literally makes no sense. Dartmouth has never been a serious contender. Penn and Brown are up and down. Harvard has two bids since 1996. Cornell and Yale are the most recently successful but Yale is the only Ivy titleist since 2012, since Princeton has gone nine consecutive years out of the tournament. But the ACC clearly dominates men's lacrosse and perhaps to its detriment, as the long-predicted national expansion has never really taken place.

The scholarship discussion is essentially two discussions: financial (the ability to buy out a student's cost of attendance) and admissions (the ability to be 100% guaranteed admission in schools where the admissions percentage are as low as 4%.) The latter is a greater internal concern to the Ivies than finances or claims of affirmative action, because it is a roadmap to admission that even the best and the brightest of applicants do not possess.

[eb59]

I thought and may be way off, but don't schools like Stanford, Rice & Duke require a Higher Standard even for their football players, as compared to the rest of FBS. Regardless, the above concern can be totally and easily managed by the schools themselves...but I get the Ivy concern of a all out Arms Race for Titles and standards being dropped...the old slippery slope argument.

[RusskyHoya]

Oct 11, 2021 13:06:51 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

The Ivy League sits in the midst of one of only two major lacrosse recruiting areas in the nation, but have not been dominant over the last 20 years, as that base has figured out you don't need to go there to have a championship experience and/or a networking tie to remain in the Northeast.

I know you were quoting/responding to my classmate CTHoya08 rather than me, but I will just flag that I said "nationally competitive" not "nationally dominant." In the last NCAA tournament in which the Ivies participated, Penn was the #4 seed and Yale was the national runner-up as the #5 seed. That is "nationally competitive" in my book. On the women's side, Princeton was the #7 seed and both Penn and Dartmouth got bids. Again - nationally competitive, in a way they are not in football, basketball, or baseball.

Oct 11, 2021 13:06:51 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

The scholarship discussion is essentially two discussions: financial (the ability to buy out a student's cost of attendance) and admissions (the ability to be 100% guaranteed admission in schools where the admissions percentage are as low as 4%.) The latter is a greater internal concern to the Ivies than finances or claims of affirmative action, because it is a roadmap to admission that even the best and the brightest of applicants do not possess.

If we take "the best and the brightest of applicants" to more or less mean how it has been perceived conventionally and historically (top standardized test scores, grades, and superlative accomplishments in co- and extra-curricular activities - your Intel Science Fair Finalists, U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts Finalists, etc.), then the Ivy League schools are hardly worried about the fact that those folks do not have access to recruited athlete slots.

The Ivies have no shortage of those folks; if they wanted to, they could have nothing but those folks. But that does not a balanced class make, not only for purely demographic reasons but also for more pragmatic - not to say base - ones. It's a not-uncommon pathway for the children of alums/donors who can spent gobs of money on private coaches and the like from a very early age, enough to get up to or near Ivy League competitive levels (especially if they are themselves the children of former Ivy League athletes...). And athletes tend to be more committed donors and boosters once they leave campus than your average alum.

Not that any of those schools are hurting for money, but they certainly appreciate the cadres of grateful "there but for the grace of sportsball..." graduates who are much less likely to be shy about flying the flag for a filthy rich institution (or attempt to burn it down, intellectually if not physically, from the inside while they are there...but that's a topic for another time).

[RusskyHoya]

Good illustration here of why, scholarships or not, Georgetown and the Ivies will never choose to go down the path of 'big-time' football:

www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2023/chris-nowitski-chris-eitzman-cte-harvard/

They just cannot justify it institutionally with their collective stakeholder ecosystems, who zero in on stories like this and take them to be representative of the sport.

The bartender returned and passed out fresh cans. A little before closing time, Daigle posed a question to the group: If you had known then what you know now about football, the game that had brought them all together, would you play? Knowing it could be you in the next casket, would you still?

[RusskyHoya]

www.sportico.com/law/analysis/2023/ivy-league-motion-to-dismiss-1234723360/amp/

In a new court filing, the Ivy League argues that an antitrust lawsuit brought by a former Brown University men’s basketball player and current member of the college’s women’s basketball team over the league’s denial of athletic scholarships doesn’t add up for a simple reason: The players could have attended similarly elite, but non-Ivy, colleges that offer athletic scholarships.

Attorneys representing Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale filed a motion to dismiss on Monday in Connecticut’s federal district court. As explained in Sportico, the lawsuit (Choh et al. v. Brown University et al.) alleges Ivy colleges have unlawfully conspired to not pay athletes “any compensation” or reimburse them for education-related expenses in exchange for their athletic services.

The Ivy League maintains its system of no athletic scholarships is consistent with member schools’ “conviction” that athletes should be “truly representative” of the student body. As the league spins it, Ivy athletes are subject to the same academic standards and the same opportunities to address economic need as their classmates.

The Ivy League further reasons that conferences enjoy autonomy to design their rules as they prefer, with prospective students able to attend colleges in other conferences with different rules.

To that end, the league contends that “some student-athletes considering a school in the Ivy League might choose instead a full athletic scholarship from UVA, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, Stanford, Georgetown, Rice, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt” or other non-Ivy schools that are likewise academically prestigious with major DI athletic programs.

The Ivy League also relies on case law. Although the NCAA lost NCAA v. Alston 9-0 at the Supreme Court, the league sees the case as supporting its position.

In Alston, the district court issued an injunction permitting “any NCAA member conference” to limit education-related compensation or benefits for athletes. The Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court later agreed, reasoning that while it is problematic under antitrust law for the NCAA and its members to limit compensation, individual conferences remain, in the words of Justice Neil Gorsuch, “free to reimpose whatever rules they choose.”

[RusskyHoya]

Just because you have schollies doesn't mean you have...uniforms