Monday, March 03, 2008
When is Harvard going to join the Big East?
If you are going to lower your standards to recruit jocks and violate NCAA rules, you might as well go in whole-hog for big-time collegiate sports. SportsProf, who does have an ax to grind, has the goods on Harvard.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Mar 03, 02:34:00 PM:
I'd love to see Harvard's academic indices for it's various teams individually (as opposed to Athletics as a whole).
By the way, great site you linked to. Thanks! I especially like seeing the Bill Carmody post. As SportsProf said- he's a very good man and coach!
By 
Escort81, at
Mon Mar 03, 04:30:00 PM:
Anonymous 2:34 - good for you for discovering the wonderful features of the SportsProf blog. It's a keeper. I actually arrived at TigerHawk through the SportsProf site. I agree with your desire to see individual teams list their AIs, but I don't think the League ADs are going to bless that in the near future.
Cross posted at SportsProf:
The strength of the incoming recruiting class at Harvard -- assuming the "likely to be admitted" letters equate to actual admissions in April -- is a bit suspicious, based on the schools the student-athletes are currently attending, and the observation quoted in the Times piece that it may be the strongest class in the history of Ivy League basketball.
Now, the NYT has, er, been known to make mistakes, both wrongfully indicting and giving a pass. I am content to let this play out and see if the kids matriculate; I hope both for their sakes and for the sake of the League, that they are capable of doing the academic work in Cambridge and will end up graduating in four years (or so). If so, it sounds like the Crimson will beat up the Big Red next season and go to the NCAAs.
The real question is, why did Harvard get a bug up its rear all of a sudden about the basketball program? Their facilities are marginally nicer (or used to be in the 1990s) than a big suburban high school gym. Aren't they content with dominance in heavyweight crew?
Perhaps at the end of the day, Harvard just took a page out of Penn's old recruiting playbook, but then again, Penn has always been statistically the easiest Ivy to get into (full disclosure: my grandfather was class of 1909, but my father had the good judgment to attend another Ivy, located in central NJ; my aunt, my cousin and my sister all have degrees from Penn). Stretching a listed athlete candidate is one thing when admit rates are 1 in 5 (as it was when SportsProf, TigerHawk and I applied a generation ago) or 1 in 3 if you were a "backyard" applicant at Penn in that same era. However, rates are 1 in 10 or 11 now, so for every slot that goes to a significantly academically under qualified candidate, there is another very well qualified candidate on the razor's edge that does not get in. Student-athletes really have to be able to do the work, otherwise it benefits no one except the coach.
