Lehigh Sports Forum

http://lehighfootballnation.blogspot.co ... ncaas.html

It's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.

Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.

The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League.

Why the Ivy League, and why now? How has the Ivy League turned things around, completely, as a league?

Good piece.

Last year a kid shared with me a mass email he got from Harvard encouraging football players with 1000 or more on their SATs to contact the coach. No joke.

Was the PL better off offering financial aid only? (Maybe not if we remember when Fordham offered schollies before the rest of us.)

Ever since PL went schollie Ivies amped up an already formidable recruiting program. Combined with virtually unlimited funds and a superb academic rep, Ivies top to bottom can out recruit most every FCS school.
Not all recruits get full rides, In fact majority of recruits do not. But, as has become evident over the last 2 years, Ivies have also broadened their their AI banding it seems.Not quite sure how. My guess is they are permitting more low band prospects. It is a fact that over the last 2 years, there have been recruits that could not be admitted to various PL schools who were admitted to an Ivy. Some of this may be that the PL team had exceeded its number of low bands but the Ivy still had room.
I note that PL admission requirements have risen dramatically over the last 10 years. The gap we enjoyed back in the 90s has shrunken substantially. I know for Lehigh quite a few of our players on our great teams of the 90s and 2000s could not get admitted today. Hence my plea that inasmuch as our academic standards wont be lowered, the PL has to modify the cap and/or redshirt restrictions if we intend to be competitive with the Ivies and Nationally.

A key aspect I believe is that Harvard can recruit 20-30 athletes every year and not pay any roster penalty. Lehigh can't do that. They have to abide by the scholarship limits set by the NCAA because their athletic financial aid "counts" and Harvard's does not (because it is offered to all students).

If Lehigh recruited 120 football athletes, even if they didn't offer them scholarships they would be violating the NCAA's rules. But Harvard can.

When you have a 30 billion dollar endowment, you have a little more 'flexibility' to do things..