Academics and Athletics Square Off

by Noah Hutson-Ellenberg and Scott Judah

Two years ago, Ian McGinnis '01, Dartmouth's mammoth power forward who ended this year as the nation's second leading rebounder, received a letter of acceptance from Harvard College's Department of Admissions. That alone should come as no surprise — Harvard sent out over 2000 such letters that year. The caveat is that McGinnis, who had applied and been accepted early-decision to Dartmouth, never submitted an application to Harvard. “Their coach wanted me badly for basketball, so they admitted me without an application,” said McGinnis. “The whole thing was pretty ridiculous.”

In the last two years, teams from the National Football League have drafted six Ivy League players — Dartmouth's Zach Walz '98, Harvard's Matt Birk, and Columbia's Marcellus Wiley (a second round pick) among them. In the previous two seasons, the NFL didn't draft a single Ivy League player.

This year, Dartmouth's men's soccer team (not even the League champions) sent two players to Major League Soccer teams — defender Bobby Meyer '99 to the Colorado Rapids and goalkeeper Matt Nyman '99 to the Dallas Burn.

In basketball, the Houston Rockets awarded former Penn guard Matt Maloney with a 17 million dollar contract. Allison Feaster, a star on Harvard's women's basketball team, was a first round pick in the inaugural WNBA draft two seasons ago.

Even more significantly, Sports Illustrated ran an article in its latest issue suggesting that the quality of men's basketball in the Ivy League was high enough (it had particularly in mind the continued dominance of Penn and Princeton) that the Ancient Eight should regularly be considered for two berths in the NCAA tournament, instead of its usual one. Only a few major conferences — the ACC, the Big Ten, the Big Twelve, the Pac-10 — regularly receive multiple tournament bids, and these conferences are comprised of schools with student populations dozens of times Dartmouth's, or Columbia's. The Ivy League, it seems, is making a bit of a push to be considered a major player in Division I athletics.

These events, taken, together, form a rather decisive conclusion: the Ivy League, as a collective athletic entity, is getting better, and in some sports (basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and field hockey especially) it is getting much better. These successes comprise a phenomenon that has widely been celebrated from Hanover to Philadelphia, and no doubt it should be. The atmosphere within which the Ivy League currently conducts its operations, however, gives some reasons for long-term concern. The current Ivy League scholar-athlete often operates in a system increasingly indifferent to his scholarship while increasingly demanding of athletic success. The newly national scope of recruiting, the full-time nature of athletic participation, and the pressure on coaches to keep up with the Jones' — those Ivy League programs that are regularly producing professional-level athletes — seem dangerously likely to combine with existing trends in Ivy League athletic and admissions departments to change the nature of Ivy League athletics to something approaching the mentality of a major, Division I conference.

Penn and National Conceptions

The University of Pennsylvania's men's basketball team enters the NCAA post-season tournament as the 11th seed in the East region. It will face the University of Florida in the first round. Last year, Princeton (the Ivy League's champion and representative) went to the tournament ranked as the eighth best team in the country; they were favored to win their second-round match-up with Michigan State University.

The year before that Princeton beat the defending national champions, UCLA. The implication here is obvious: in men's basketball at least, the Ivy League is used to regularly competing with (and occasionally beating) large state schools with massive undergraduate programs and extensive resources which offer all their athletes full merit-based athletic scholarships.

Penn basketball coach Fran Dunphy says the national orientation of his program is conscious. Penn, he says, is “definitely” playing “out of their league” right now, and is competitive on a national level. His scheduling, he says, is oriented to reflect his national vision for his program. Next year, Penn will take on national powers Maryland, Kansas, Penn State, and Temple.

Princeton's Bill Carmody, who declined to be interviewed, has taken his program in a similar direction. This year, Princeton played Texas, UNC-Charlotte, and Maryland — all highly regarded NCAA tournament teams.

Recruiting Changes

A basketball program, of course, is a little easier to develop quickly than is a football program or a soccer program. For basketball, you only need six or seven top players, and you're set. For football, it's more along the lines of forty-five. But the Ivy League larger team sports — football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse — have been undergoing similar changes, if not quite as successful.

Dartmouth football coach John Lyons cited two recent Ivy League-wide reforms as the primary reasons for the league's persistent competitiveness and recent NFL success: spring ball and freshman eligibility.

“When you combine freshmen getting a chance to play with 3 springs worth of practices, your guys just get to play a whole lot more football than before,” Lyons told us. “Before we were at a big disadvantage, but now our players can get some real experience before their junior and senior years.” The Ivy League had long prohibited freshmen from playing varsity football and teams from holding spring practices. But with other schools gradually improving relative to the Ivies, largely because of these two practices, coaches pushed for an end to these restraints.

Several years ago the prohibitions were dropped, and the results speak for themselves. “Lloyd Lee `98 [currently with the San Diego Chargers] started his freshmen year,” coach Lyons pointed out. “We're [Ivy League football] far more main-stream now,” agreed Brown football coach Phil Estes.

But in addition to these reforms, Estes noted another change in Ivy football that has kept the league competitive: more aggressive, and more national, recruiting.

“Recruiting has changed. We're not waiting for them to come to us, we're going after them,” said Estes. He also emphasized the newly national bent of Ivy League recruiting: Brown can no longer afford to ignore any regions of the country. Tim Murphy, Harvard football coach, repeated the sentiment almost word-for-word: “Ivy football has improved through a combination of more aggressive and more national recruiting.”

But Estes revealed that Brown's biggest recruiting strategy has become going after “division IA players who fall through the cracks.” As he put it: “A lot of division IA schools go after a ton of players early, but then let a few go before the recruiting process is over. If he's got the grades to make it at Brown, and has got the skill to grab the interest of a division IA school, then we're now interested in him. That's been the change; we're going after these top guys.”

Brown isn't the only one.

Several Ivy League schools aren't just trying to steal recruits away from division I-A schools; they're also stealing players. “We're also looking for players at these schools who may have become disenchanted with the program, who may be looking for a different kind of school,” said Estes.

Yale scooped up two I-A football players via transfer last year, and other schools (Dartmouth included) have taken advantage of transfers in a number of sports, not just football. Football is the most unique in this area, however, since players can go from I-A to I-AA (football is the only sport with this designation) without losing a year of eligibility.

Strength and Conditioning

More important, and potentially more problematic, Dartmouth and other Ivy League schools have developed more extensive programs for keeping their athletes in top-level playing shape once they've arrived at school.

Dartmouth Athletic Director Dick Jaegar has been particularly impressed with the effect of full-time weight training on Dartmouth athletes.

“The impact has been huge. Our guys don't just have more bulk; they're in better shape overall which can mean less injuries.” Yale football coach John Siedlecki agrees: “Full time weight trainers enable fuller development of my players' potentials.” Dartmouth has had a weight trainer in-residence for a number of years, but the program has really prospered with the recent addition of strength guru Jay Butler.

“Before Butler, weight training (at Dartmouth) was a joke,” said Brian Nickerson '00, Dartmouth's shortstop (drafted out of high school by the Anaheim Angels) and a co-captain of Indian baseball.

The growth of the weight program has also brought with it the near universal use, particularly among strength-sport athletes, of controversial muscle-building supplements, particularly creatine.

AI: Bane of Ivy Sports

The tough Ivy League academic standards greatly reduce the pool of available athletes. Because of this, Ivy League recruiting is extremely competitive, at a level equal to, if not greater than, the recruiting among the nation's college football and basketball powerhouses. “Coaching in the Ivy League is one of the toughest jobs I know,” said Jaeger.

Ivy League coaches are hindered in their recruiting by the prohibition of athletic scholarships, a practice that along with the high costs of an Ivy League education, makes the offer of a full scholarship from a less academically rigorous university more appealing.

Coaches must also take into account the academic index, a rating of each recruit's academic merits. The index is derived from the student's SAT I scores, SAT II scores, and class rank or GPA in high school. The maximum AI is 240 and the average AI for a Dartmouth student hovers around 212. Ivy League coaches can only hope to get a recruit with an AI of 169 or higher accepted.

However, while coaches can not circumvent the lack of athletic scholarships, they can manipulate the AI figures. A recruit from a high school with grade inflation can easily clear the 169 cutoff with SAT scores in the 1100s — around the 65th percentile.

Michele Hernandez writes that a typical Dartmouth applicant should have a 1490 on his SATs to expect to be admitted. This means that while most Dartmouth students are in the 99th percentile — truly an intellectual elite — some athletes are minimally above average.

Another regulation holds that the average AI of the most popular sports teams must be within one standard deviation of the school's overall AI average.

While coaches may claim that this restriction hampers their recruiting, Hernandez says, they are able to put higher AI students on the team to allow for lower AI recruits; the former spend four years cheering on their team from the bench.

What Price Marcellus Wiley?

Several years ago, new Columbia football coach Ray Tellier revived their horrible program by recruiting aggressively on the West Coast. His star recruit was Marcellus Wiley, tailback who had been recruited by Pac-10 powers like UCLA.

Wiley spent his first two seasons as a 220-pound running back, but had his breakthrough season his junior year as a 270-pound defensive end. Wiley was the dominant player in the Ivy League that year, but his grades suffered and Columbia expelled him.

Columbia told Wiley that he would have to maintain a B+ average at an academically comparable school in order to return to Columbia.

Wiley attended West Los Angeles Community College and Columbia readmitted him a year later.

In addition, Columbia, which prides itself on its stringent policy on transfer credit, allowed Wiley a year's worth of credit from West Los Angeles Community College. Wiley once again dominated Ivy League football, leading Columbia to a second-place finish in the standings, an accomplishment once unimaginable.

Wiley was drafted in the second round by the Buffalo Bills. It is troubling that Columbia's high academic standards were so blatantly ignored in order to achieve success in their football program.

Jock Jams 5: Live from Princeton?

Ivy League schools have begun spending serious amounts of money renovating their sports facilities in order to attract recruits. In addition to several renovations of locker rooms and sports facilities, Princeton recently built a $45 million replacement for Palmer Stadium, before its destruction the second-oldest stadium in the nation.

The new stadium is heavily commercial, a disturbing trend in Ivy League athletics, containing luxury boxes and an advertisement-laced scoreboard. Princeton officials hope the new facilities will spur increased interest among recruits: this is imitative of strategies at major Division I schools.

Changes like these led Sports Illustrated to rank Princeton as the #10 “jock school” in the nation. SI also ranked Harvard #34. T

he magazine defines a jock school as “any college or university in which sports are central to campus life... in selecting the proper Jock School for you, academics are, well... academic... Education may be noble, but it is hardly your duty.”

This is a far cry from the image our league held as recently as fifteen years ago. Needless to say, Princeton faculty were disturbed by Sports Illustrated's portrayal of their institution, concerned about a negative impact on Princeton's academic prestige.

Mainstream if not Upstream

Ivy League sports are undergoing a gradual shift towards the mainstream practices of the division I-A powerhouses. Coaches are more aggressively pursuing top athletes and schools are spending increasing amounts of money on sports. Are these changes weakening the academic standards of the Ivy League?

There are both discouraging and encouraging signs. Dartmouth varsity athletes have a higher overall graduation rate in four years that do our non-athletes, yet average high school students, who normally would have little chance of being accepted to Ivy League schools, are riding their athletic prowess to admission.

Ivy League schools are sending the wrong message through their increasing commitment to fielding top sports teams.

Ivy League schools can maintain competitive teams without compromising their academic integrity, but the pursuit of national titles inevitably will lead to the watering down of the field of accepted students,which may, down, the road, deprive all of the best Ivy League education.