The Journal on Why Harvard Football is So Good
Posted on November 20th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 24 Comments »
In the WSJ, Matthew Futterman takes a crack at explaining how Harvard’s football team has become such a powerhouse.
His answers include:
1) An alumni booster program that pays for a lot of the football program’s expenses
2) Harvard’s generous financial aid program, which allows the university to give athletic scholarships while pretending that they aren’t athletic scholarships (Okay, Futterman put it somewhat differently)
3) The sales pitch that if you go to Harvard, you can play for a serious program and get a Harvard education if football doesn’t work out
4) A commitment to play big-time football
As a result, Harvard is 9-0 this year—only Yale, at 8-1 is close, and we’ll see what happens on Saturday—and has an offensive line averaging 6’5″ and 287 pounds. The roster includes 13 players from Texas and 13 from Georgia.
So all of this makes sense in terms of explaining how the football program at Harvard got so good; it doesn’t do so much at explaining why and what the consequences of that are. Are you trying to tell me that those 13 football players from Texas come close to Harvard’s traditional academic standards? If so, I have some derivatives to sell you. (Y’all know what Texas football is like, don’t you?) And what kind of impact does the presence of all these intellectually under-achieved behemoths on campus have? In my very limited experience, big-time recruited athletes at Yale (there weren’t very many) produced a lot of cynicism among the other students, who sensed that these kids really didn’t fit in very well and struggled academically.
Harvard has already had one academic scandal with a significant athlete connection. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time till there are more. Meanwhile, one imagines the number of “gut” classes growing.
(And yes, to the inevitable people who say, “I know a brilliant comp sci major who’s also a star running back”—certainly those people exist. But they’re the exception.)
And I go back to the question of why—of what real benefit is it to the University to have a high level football program? When I was at Yale, our athletic programs were, you know, pretty good, but we were never going to be Ohio State—and that was just fine. In fact, people kind of liked the idea that there was still one place in college sports, the Ivy League, where athletics were not the be-all and end-all of campus and alumni life.) Now Harvard has started an athletic arms race—in basketball, football, and elsewhere, I’m sure—and other Ivy League schools are playing catch up. But to the best of my knowledge, there’s never been any campus debate about this, no presidential direction, no outpouring of alumni frustration over the state of college athletics. And yet the culture of the college—and the Ivy League—is changing as a result.
Sure, it’s nice to have a basketball team that gets a lot of attention. But is it worth lowering academic standards and opening the door to the same kind of corruption that top-tier NCAA schools seem generally happy to tolerate?
24 Responses
11/20/2014 6:49 pm
What a weird juxtaposition — a defense of Yale QB Patrick Witt, who is at Harvard Law School, followed by an attack on Harvard football.
11/21/2014 5:23 am
I know that, on the surface, the juxtaposition might look odd, but I don’t think it is. The Witt item is really a piece about bad journalism and the vagaries of the process by which colleges adjudicate sexual assault allegations. The Harvard piece is about the uncertain raison d’être for a big-time football program, and the way in which high-powered athletic programs, led by Harvard, are changing the culture of the Ivy League.
In any case, Patrick Witt, who was a Rhodes candidate and now attends a fine law school, is a great example of the scholar athlete. He’s proof that it’s possible to be academically serious and play athletics at a high level, and I’m sure there are others like him. But at all schools with big-time athletics programs, academic standards are generally lowered for athletes, and I think it’s either arrogance or naivete or wishful thinking to suggest that Harvard (or Yale, for that matter) would be any different.
11/22/2014 4:00 am
I had one of these Texan freshmen in a seminar at the beginning of the semester. He didn’t strike me as any less brilliant than the other 20 kids there, who came from all walks of life and about 10 different countries. (They were all a lot smarter than me, but that’s not saying much.) I’ll be waiting for your MIT football expose next…
11/22/2014 6:44 am
Greg-Nonsense: I’m sure you’re very smart. But you must know that such anecdotal information doesn’t prove much. A better example would be to go back and look at the cheating scandal from a couple years back and consider the relationship between that and the number of athletes in the class.
That said, I’ll admit that I’m guilty of stereotyping here, based on the idea that it’s extremely hard to get to that level of athletic prowess—and devote that much time to sports— and at the same time excel academically. And also based on the experience of NCAA sports, of course.
So, tell you what—I’d love it if someone could speak to the larger issue of whether these football and basketball recruits are admitted with the same academic achievements as non-athletes, and if they perform as well academically (taking into account the relative difficulty of the classes they take).
If Harvard has somehow managed to be the one school which finds all the academic diamonds in the football rough, more power to it, and congratulations to such impressive young men and women.
But surely you will admit that such a state of affairs does not exist anywhere else, and so one must be skeptical that Harvard has somehow managed to shift the paradigm.
There used to be an ideal of Ivy League sports: That it was competitive within itself if nowhere else, and that was good, because one didn’t want sports, so dominant in other areas of American culture and higher education, to be that way at Harvard, Yale and the other Ivies. As important and exciting as they are, other things are more important, and excellence is a finite thing; you can’t be as good at sports at Harvard wants to be without something suffering somewhere else.
That ideal is clearly a thing of the past now, and Harvard has led the way in dismantling it.
I love a good football team as much as anyone else, and I hope Yale beats the crap out of Harvard today. But as a question of principle, Idon’t think that’s a good thing.
Granted, I could be wrong—times change, standards have risen: We none of us could get into the Harvard/Yale of today, blah-blah.
I’ve just never heard anyone make the argument. Why is it so important to have a nationally ranked basketball team? (Or hockey team, or football team, or squash team, etc.) What is gained by it, and what is lost?
And no, alumni giving is not a good enough reason.
Because surely something is lost, and in all the excitement about Harvard being really good at football, no one seems to be talking about that.
11/23/2014 12:03 am
Richard,
I am sympathetic to part of your argument, but you lose me when you make bizarre statements like this:
“So, tell you what—I’d love it if someone could speak to the larger issue of whether these football and basketball recruits are admitted with the same academic achievements as non-athletes, and if they perform as well academically (taking into account the relative difficulty of the classes they take).”
Well, probably not. But Harvard also takes people with exceptional talents in music who might not be the same academic level as the average Harvard student. And I’m sure we on occasion take exceptional mathematics students who are painfully poor writers (outside of mathematics), and are below average once you take them out of that slice of the academic environment that they’re comfortable with. Why wouldn’t we want someone who may not be quite the same level academically as an alternative student who could have accepted, but who has shown excellence in an athletic area as well? (And, as my colleagues Greg and Harry have pointed out, the Ivys can get a number of academically high achieving athletes.)
Look, I’m a Harvard undergrad that was so academically oriented that now I’m a Harvard professor. I get that Harvard is an “academic” place. But I certainly don’t buy into the argument that somehow we should (even if we could) optimize one-dimensionally on academic performance as our sole criterion for admission. I look at Harvard’s goal holistically: our goal is to train the future leaders of the world. That’s a big goal. The idea that academic excellence is the sole metric we should be using to fulfill that goal does not match my experience. At the very least, it would make Harvard a less diverse place, in terms of talents of the students.
So if you want to make the case that Harvard’s success in sports is somehow causing damage to the school’s mission, go ahead. But let’s not start with the assumption that the school’s mission is JUST to have the top SAT scores walking around campus. As pointed out by others, perhaps it’s best not to make the stereotyped assumption that “athletes” is equivalent to “academic underperformers”. And finally, let’s not start with the assumption that the “cheating scandal” you keep referring to was the sole province of athletes, or even dominated by them (except perhaps in the amount of ink used by newspapers reporting on it) — I believe Harry has written a great deal about that incident that shows there are better justified interpretations of that situation.
My read is without these assumptions you don’t really have much of an argument at this point. But I’m always interested to see what you have to write, and perhaps you’ll have a richer argument in the future.
11/23/2014 12:16 am
What is gained by having a nationally ranked math team, superb journalists or outstanding thespians? Athletics are central to American culture. Why would you deny the Ivy League, its students, faculty and alumni, the joy to participate on the edge of elite college athletics? Sounds like you are becoming nothing more than a scores and grades proponent. Logically, that is the end of your argument. Imagine the swath of non-student athletes that would disappear—say, 70% of the remaining student body at Harvard.
11/23/2014 11:21 am
MM
A number of years ago there was a study of Harvard admits, specifically with regard to athletes on the football team, and men’s and women’s ice hockey and basketball teams. Showed that the admits on these teams on the whole were far below the academic level of their incoming cohort. Perhaps HL can comment on this. Also, why are there so many international students on the men’s squab team.
11/23/2014 11:43 am
prep school —
“admits on these teams on the whole were far below the academic level of their incoming cohort. ”
OK — why would this be surprising? They have demonstrated excellence in another area that could/would be interpreted as compensating.
A quick search online found this, which seems to say what you’re saying, but (if you read to the end) also provides a broader argument (which is similar to mine).
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/9/keeping-score-eric-t-westerfield-a/?page=2
See also
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/sports/before-athletic-recruiting-in-the-ivy-league-some-math.html?pagewanted=all
for more on the scoring.
11/23/2014 11:44 am
prep school
11/23/2014 1:52 pm
Why does football continue to be a sport at Harvard and other schools in the conference. One percent of the students at Harvard play football. Does it create school spirit as it used to? Or does it exist because ex football players and other varsity athletes give disproportionately in terms of money to the school.
Not long ago at Harvard, and it may be the same today, recruited athletes were admitted at four times the rate of others. Recruited athletes have a lower academic performance while at the university because of their relatively lower academic credentials coming into the university.
The real question is what you said. Should excellence in athletics be a determining factor for being admitted to the university. A second question would be whether the intensity involved in athletics is worth it, assuming Harvard wants to be involved on a national scale in certain sports.
11/23/2014 2:05 pm
I recognize that it is important for Harvard College to admit a number of students whose special talent is a sport. It’s always been so, and for good reasons. The difference now is there are so many varsity sports, for both men and (happily) for women, and a substantial fraction of the students play them. Keeping so many teams populated with quality athletes makes, I suspect, a significant difference in the composition of the College.
Some teams (wrestling) seem to exist just in order for one or two star athletes to excel, while the other members are supporting cast who receive modest attention from coaches. It is certainly nice that men’s basketball is finally successful, but how many team members get actual game time these days?
I agree with Richard’s point that “the ideal of Ivy League sports” is being lost. Is Harvard leading higher education and intercollegiate athletics, or following?
11/23/2014 8:39 pm
Who ever said Harvard’s mission is to train the “future leaders” … of the world, no less? Is that carved in stone? Isn’t it rather grand and self-important? Why are Americans so obsessed with leaders, and leadership? Is that the only cohort worth Harvard’s while? But perhaps i misunderstand your meaning.
11/23/2014 8:52 pm
I had a comment that appears to have gotten cut- I forgot links are no longer comment-acceptable. The links pointed to what prep school referred to; there’s been numerous articles on the “point system” used for athletes on the Ivy’s if one wants to look online. The end question for prep was — so what? People are chosen at Harvard for their schools, and should not athletic excellence (for some) be seen as compensatory for a shortcoming in academic skill?
A good start (and easy to find online) is an article called Keeping Score in the Crimson from about 2003. Since I can’t link, here are some quotes:
Over the last decade, critics focused on the big-time, revenue-generating college sports programs—North Carolina basketball, Michigan football and the like. But as the frenzy over selective college admissions grew to a feverish pitch in the second half of the 1990s, disgruntled rejected applicants began to point fingers at competing constituencies they believed were unqualified—first minorities, and more recently legacies. It was only logical that the biggest group of students to benefit from a non-academic selection preference—athletes—have now come under fire.
The way elite colleges approach athletic admissions reveals much about how broadly they define the merit that underpins meritocracy. Nobody wants a British-style system, where academic test scores are all that matter. But colleges recognize musical talent, reward unique life experiences and the overcoming of adversity, and recently established a “compelling interest” in racial diversity at the Supreme Court. What, if anything, separates prowess on the playing field from talent on the trombone?
With fans, coaches and alumni demanding successful squads, and outside critics and professors calling athletes academic underachievers, admissions offices are being pressured to answer this question from “every conceivable source and constituency,” according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67. How admissions committees serve these two masters will effectively chart the course their universities take over the next decade. Harvard’s preliminary answer may be found in the envelope, thick or thin, that many of the Crimson students in Westerfield’s database receive this December.
…
The next hurdle to surmount after AI consideration is what Harvard calls the “broken leg test.” It means exactly what it sounds like—how would a recruit take advantage of Harvard’s other opportunities if she were to break her leg. “Will this person be good in a seminar, with a professor, in a dining hall?” asks Fitzsimmons. “Will this person grow? We don’t sign people to contracts to play field hockey.” To find out if they, as McGrath Lewis says, will be “able to turn a corner,” admissions officials look for well-rounded candidates. “If a kid was his class vice president,” she says, “maybe he can work with people, so he’d do Phillips Brooks House or something. You look for people who can show some signs of personal flexibility. People decide they’ve done enough football.”
…
Taking recruited athletes in substantial numbers also corresponds with the pursuit of Harvard’s highest ideal of all: excellence. More than any other school in the country, Harvard seeks out excellence in every conceivable activity—it leans towards “well-lopsided” students, especially in the early action round. According to McGrath Lewis, every year, just 300 students are accepted for primarily academic reasons—which doesn’t mean they got a lot of A’s in high school, because everyone did; it means they uncovered the influence of a long-forgotten advisor to Queen Elizabeth I while researching a term paper. The remaining 1,700 or so accepted students certainly have top grades and SAT scores, but they also tend to demonstrate some uncommon excellence in one area or another. Just think of how many of your friends can be identified by a single phrase: a piano player; a Crimson writer; a field hockey stud. “Excellence, whatever form it is, is a surrogate for personal qualities,” says Fitzsimmons. And indeed, it’s personal qualities—discipline, teamwork, perseverance, etc.—that the most passionate supporters of athletics cite as the reason why athletes should be valued.
Yet if it were personal qualities, represented by excellence, that Harvard was after, it would pursue more and more highly specialized kids, with lower cutoff points on grades and SAT’s, until it became, in effect, a vocational school for every extracurricular activity under the sun, where students breezed through classes between rehearsals, practices or lab time—precisely the opposite of the liberal arts ideal it seeks to embody. It would, in short, abandon the broken leg test. It might also take a disproportionate number of community service-minded applicants on the grounds that they demonstrated uncommon personal qualities, contrary to administrators’ reminder to first-years that they are here primarily to learn and to participate in Harvard life.
11/23/2014 9:06 pm
To “for MM” :
What do you think Harvard’s goal is? It’s hard to find an actual mission statement; one I found below is easily found online. It explicitly mentions leading as one of the desired outcomes of a Harvard education.
Harvard is an institution that has the top students throughout the word applying — far more than we could accept for a very small number of thoughts. The idea that we want to teach and train students for the benefit of the world — which, certainly from my understanding, means as one of the outcomes helping them to become leaders in their chosen community, whether that is scientific, academic, political, etc. — is just a fundamental part of my understanding of our mission.
I don’t think it’s grand and self-important. It’s just what we aim to do.
Perhaps you’re thinking of “leader” as being President or something. That’s not what I mean. I would include leaders in thought — such as great writers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, etc.
The Mission of Harvard College
Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought; to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation; and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions. Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students’ full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential. Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead. The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.
11/23/2014 9:24 pm
That was “slots”, not thoughts above. A small number of slots. Oops.
11/23/2014 10:52 pm
Does excellence in athletics compensate for the much lower academic performance. Admits with other forms of excellence don’t seem to have that problem. Have you looked at the overall rate of cum, magna and summa graduates between athletes and non athletes. How do you explain a substantially higher admittance rate of athletes versus non athletes.
If one percent of undergrads play football, isn’t that a crucial factor in limiting as McGrath Lewis said, just 300 students are accepted primarily for academic reasons. Is it really necessary to have so many foreign students on the men’s squash team. Are Harvard’s, and the other Ivies, priorities pointing in the wrong direction. Is it really necessary to have Harvard’s football team showcased on the West Coast as the coach wants.
11/24/2014 1:28 pm
One of the quotes on the TV when I happened to turn on the game Saturday: “There are 14 valedictorians on the field…” (or maybe it was 15, I don’t remember.)
So yeah, get over the fact that a lot of these guys are smart and can play football too.
11/24/2014 2:38 pm
Michael-Comments with links are perfectly acceptable, it’s just that I have to “approve” them-basically, let them be posted. I was just getting inundated with spam-literally, hundreds of bogus posts….
11/24/2014 2:42 pm
Greg-Well, that’s 7 players per team and, what, about 50 guys a team? I suspect that 14 percent of a class being valedictorians is actually below Harvard standards.
And, of course, there’s the fact that “valedictorian” means different things in different places. Here’s from Wikipedia:
“Some institutions award the title based upon various criteria such as overall academic record of grades and credits, a student’s grade point average, the level of rigor within a student’s academic program of studies, a vote by school administrators, the level of participation in and dedication to extracurricular activities, and one’s public-speaking skills and abilities. In other schools, the position may be elected by the school body or appointed directly by the school administration based on various systems of merit. ”
In other schools, the position may be elected by the school body….
11/25/2014 6:14 am
It’s not uncommon for a college or a prep school that decides to upgrade it’s football or basketball team by reaching out to athletes it wouldn’t have recruited in the past to wind up with a rape scandal on its hands. The Naval Academy is one example.
11/25/2014 9:21 am
Google Deans. Patriots Owner Kick Off Sports Innovation Challenge for yesterday’s Crimson article. It will make you retch. You will see the dean of the business school saying how do we bring more of these moments to peoples lives these transcendent moments. Is this what Harvard has become. Appears so. Caught up in sports as never before
12/2/2024 2:29 pm
Didn’t Yale win the NCAA Division I Hockey tournament in 2013? How many Canadians on that team? (Y’all know what Canadian hockey is like, eh?). Wasnt Yale 8-1 and if they won the game would have had the EXACT same record as cheating scandal plagued Harvard? Lets see: Athletic success and cheating scandal at Harvard, must be a correlation. Athletic success and no cheating scandal at Yale, lack of correlation equals Eli virginity. Really? Do you have to approach an important subject with lazy stereotypes (Texas?) and rely on unproven correlations. You can do better.
12/3/2024 9:23 am
“Are you trying to tell me that those 13 football players from Texas come close to Harvard’s traditional academic standards?”
Often, people are admitted to Harvard that don’t come close to its ‘traditional academic standards. Take Mike Einziger, the guitarist for the band ‘Incubus’, for example. He is a college drop out from a state university. There is no way his high school academic performance and SAT scores meet Harvard’s ‘traditional academic standards’. He was admitted as part of the Harvard celebrity program that admits actors, rock stars, etc. that have public exposure, the means to afford the tuition, a high net worth and other attributes many ‘traditional’ applicants don’t have.
Basically, he took a slot from some high school valedictorian from fly over country that applied but wasn’t accepted.
It helped that he has Harvard connections and is an atheist.
Furthermore, what proof do you have that these football players failed to meet Harvard’s ‘traditional’ standards, other than speculation and perhaps bias because they are from Texas and play football?
12/5/2024 5:21 pm
Having shared your four years at Yale (and as a moderately recruited athlete), I’m with you on the general points, but have two issues:
* You over-generalize. Many of the highly recruited athletes — major and minor sports — were not just qualified, but highly qualified students.
* There was some sort of halcyon early day of the gentleman scholar/athlete.
There are certainly a bunch of athletes during our time at Yale who were either not qualified (in strictly academic terms) or, even if qualified on paper, not well suited to the academic rigors. But, not the case of all the recruited athletes.
The Ivy League is synonymous with academic excellence, but was formed as an athletic conference — and formed at a time when collegiate sports in the Northeast were much more prominent than they are now. The Yale Bowl routinely sold out. Yale swim teams not only were dominant nationally, the exhibition pool (2-3000 seats?) routinely sold out … and they had televised meets. Admissions was much less rigorous and standardized. Which is to say that I’d wager it is far more likely that top athletes then got favorable admissions than today’s.
In any case, sorry to come to this post late. I was pointed to the blog by Anna Merlan’s apology and kept reading …