Howard Gensler
Postdoc
Posts: 4141
Reg: 11-21-04
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03-05-06 07:32 PM - Post#16932
In response to Old Bear
Why not just yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater?
I can't tell if you're trying to fuel the flames with this notion or are serious but I'll try to answer (and the ProJo site wouldn't let me register so I'm not sure of McNamara's points) ...
1. How would it be in keeping with the Ivy ideal to strive for excellence to say that the only way we can compete is to make our best team worse?
2. What Ivy fans? Penn and Princeton are the only two Ivy schools with actual basketball fans. If you try to make Penn worse and thus diminish the quality of the product further do you think more people will come out to the games? How many Brown students were at the game last night for senior night? 50? 100?
3. When you say that Penn "continues to go its own way" are you implying something other than Penn has a consistent coaching situation, the best arena, the best schedule, the best Ivy city for college basketball and inarguably the best recent tradition? The way that Penn continues to go is to strive to be a competitive national team even with all the ridiculous roadblocks the League throws in its way to the benefit of no one - including, obviously, the other teams in the League.
4. Since Penn has one of the largest student bodies in the League, would it really be fair to bump up Penn's Academic Index when it has so many more spots to fill and, as we all have heard repeatedly from H-Y-P chants, is already losing the cream of the academic crop to H-Y-P.
5. Surely Ivy fans deserve to have something more to look forward to than more speculation as to whether Penn or occasionally Princeton is going to be in the play-in game - which is what the speculation will be if you try to bring Penn back to the pack.
6. Ever since Penn's Final Four team, the Ivies have repeatedly raised the AI as the schools have gotten increasingly more costly. The League has gotten no more competitive. Many of us have said repeatedly that the only real way to make the League more competitive is to improve the financial aid packages across the board, but the "purists" don't want to hear it. Others think that will just make the Ps better.
They're almost assuredly right. But you're dealing with basic mathematics, which Ivy grads should be able to understand.
Let's say, for argument's sake, every DI basketball team brings in 3 recruits a year, that's approximately 1,000 kids across the country for the 330-plus teams. Now because of academics, lets say 800 of those kids are eliminated from Ivy recruiting contention and of the 200 academically qualified players, 10 are in the top 200, 30 are in the next 300 and the remaining 160 are in the 501-1000 group.
If you give competitive financial aid packages (you can call them scholarships if you wish) you have more Top 200 and Top 500 kids willing to consider the Ivies and the Ps can't get all of them. Some of them will filter down and make the other teams more competitive with their intra-state rivals, Patriot League foes and occasional major conference matchups. Raising the overall level of play in the League will get the League winner a better NCAA seed and will get League losers a chance for NIT bids and more exposure which will make the League more attractive and the cycle will feed on itself.
The way the Ivies do it now, of the 200 or so kids who may be able to get in, 45 of the Top 50 automatically take a scholarship. Then the rest of the League fights over the remaining 5 and Penn usually gets two of them, Princeton gets one and the other six teams split the remaining two then battle over the twenty of the remaining 150 players, who've decided they want to or can afford to go Ivy.
That math basically doesn't change. Maybe it's 100 instead of 200 academically eligible players but the archaic financial aid rules knock 75 percent of them out of the picture. So everyone fights over a small pool and six of the schools have inherent disadvantages when fishing in that small pool.
The only sensible solution, therefore, is to enlarge the pool. And since we all value education and do not want our teams to resemble many of the major conference programs whose athletes take joke course and still don't graduate, the only way to enlarge the pool is to make the Ivies a viable financial choice for a greater number of the academically-eligible athletes.
If you follow your suggestion and continue to shrink the pool (further raise the AI and costs) the odds are that Penn and Princeton will merely cherry-pick the players who are currently your top recruits and you will be forced down another tier and then that cycle will perpetuate itself and in another decade we'll all be longing for an opportunity to play in the play-in game.
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