Sundayamqb wrote: ↑Mon Oct 08, 2018 12:19 am
I still don't get the Ivy thing.
Ten years ago Ivies still could give afford to give every kid a full ride -- based on need, right? What's changed? They're letting in kids that never would have gotten in before? We were competitive then. Ivies have no red-shirts, either. (I think lack of red-shirts severely hampers PL.)
Rich, are you saying PL roster sizes are limited, that we CAN'T TAKE walk-ons (some of whom undoubtedly would grow into solid players)? Some great athletes pick universities first (as many did years ago at LU) over playing sports or getting paid to play.
A buddy's son got into Princeton only because he played football. The dad paid full boat. The son hated the program and left the team after a year, but got a great education. (What HS star who really is a scholar-athlete wouldn't hate going to practice every day and getting your head bashed in as a third- or fourth-stringer while trying to do well academically at PU?)
Working on something but did want to jump in and mention a couple things here.
1. "Ten years ago, the Ivies could afford to give every kid who could get into the school a full ride based on need" That is technically true - but the Ivies did not do so. Starting in about 2001, many of the Ivy League schools (starting with Princeton), padded by enormous endowments, started to do things like changing the loan part of the sliding financial aid scale to all grants. Over a time it started a "bidding war" (partially enveloping other high-academic private schools as well, like PL schools and Davidson, and Lehigh for that matter) ending up at a point where the schools with the biggest endowments (H-Y-P) were able to essentially scholarship most students making under, say, just about $100,000/yr. Long story short, ten years ago there was a seismic change in the amount of aid Ivies were now offering all students, with the richest schools offering the most.
I am not against affordable education - the overall effects of this policy have been great, especially if you have a kid who went (or goes) there. Many kids who ordinarily wouldn't have considered or been able to afford an Ivy education now are able to go. However, this policy doesn't fit into the idea of the NCAA in regards to how they regulate Division I football teams by number of scholarships. So far, the "policy" has been for the NCAA to pretend that it doesn't exist.
2. "They are letting kids in that never would have gotten before?" I don't believe that this is necessarily the case, but what I do think is, across the board, the Ivy League has discovered that they can recruit 2x more players than all the other FCS schools. Harvard was I believe the first team to figure this out, which tails with the dominance Harvard has had over the last decade (which has just recently come to an end). CAA, Patriot League, the NEC, Big Sky, every FCS school are limited by one number - 63. That's the NCAA limit on scholarships a school can offer. The schools of the Ivy League have figured out that, since they are not offering FOOTBALL scholarships, they can simply recruit as many football players as they care to, and since they are not getting a FOOTBALL scholarship, it "doesn't count" in the NCAA limit. This has far-reaching effects. There are NCAA rules about contacting recruits and there is a definition of a "recruited athlete". An Ivy League coach can contact players that, if done by a PL, CAA or NEC coach, would flip the switch to "recruited athlete" and thus make him subject to scholarship + offer rules.
This was not always the case. There was a time in the oughts and early tens that schools like Dartmouth and Yale probably could have assembled powerhouse teams, but due to institutional pushback or ineffective coaches, they did not. Whatever it was, it's gone now, as Yale and Dartmouth have clearly caught up. It's my belief that most of the "issue" was that the Ivies had decided to limit themselves. Somewhere along the way, the gloves were taken off.
3. "Ivies have no red-shirts, either." Anyone who has followed the Ivy League for any period of time knows that this isn't true. It IS true that some of the same tricks to get around the redshirt rules (medical exemptions, "grayshirting" by going through a year at some prep school) have been used and are used by PL schools. However Harvard in particular had become especially brazen about creatively redshirting players. There have been stories for years about players at Harvard "taking a year off because of grades", including one hilarious year when a QB had a "problem with grades" that magically disappeared midway through a season when the 1st and 2nd string QBs both got season-ending injuries. But the story of Larry Allen, Jr. doesn't even try to pretend that his issue for redshirting a year had anything to do with prep school, injury - or even grades. Just an announcement that he is taking a semester off - and that he'd be ready to play the following season. I think the consensus is that his "year off" will really help his body develop for his eventual inclusion in the NFL Draft.
4. "We can't take walk-ons". That is not true - PL schools can take walk-ons. However, the roster size limit severely hampers the ability to leverage walk-ons. Camp begins in August, and starts before the student body gets to school. The size of this roster is 90 athletes, of which a grand total of 60 full- or partial- scholarships are represented. That means you have incoming scholarship freshmen, perhaps a handful of PWOs, last year's returning scholarship players, and the scout team. Let's say your top 2 RBs get hurt, both on full scholarship. What does a team do? They can't replace the scholarships. They can move up, say, 1 guy on partial scholarship and 1 scout team guy on the depth chart. They can move, say, a WR or DB to RB. They could also theoretically set up an open tryout on campus to see if anyone wants to play football - however, they couldn't do this until school actually starts, and by that time the season could be half over. 90 seems like a huge number - but it's really not, especially because no team escapes summer uninjured.
The Ivy League doesn't have this problem for a variety of reasons, but the biggest ones are that they already have a four-deep chart of guys that were
recruited to play RB, and that the Ivy League doesn't artificially tell their members that they camp with only 90 players. This Saturday, Princeton dressed more than 100 players vs. Lehigh, which is more than the number of players that were
allowed to show up at Lehigh's camp in August. (Schools like Delaware have 100 student-athletes on their roster, but not all of them are recruited football athletes, and the grant total of all the football-related scholarship aid has to equal 63.)
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This doesn't have much to do with Lehigh losing to Princeton in particular this weekend - or the margin of defeat. But it does show a reality going forward that that Ivy League games, especially on the road, are going to look a lot more like games against CAA opponents. I don't think that institutionally Ivy League schools will go back to the "good old days" of self-regulation.