| Subject: An Alternative Perspective on the State of Ivy League Athletics |
Author:
 IvySportsJunkie
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Date Posted: 19:06:14 07/21/25 Mon
On another thread, it pointed out a criticism of the Learfield Cup rankings of the nation’s top overall university athletic programs. The Learfield Cup system does favor schools like the Ivy League and Stanford that have a greater number of varsity sports teams. This got me to explore how the Ivy League compares to the D1 power schools in overall athletics. While clearly the Ivy League is losing a number of prospective athletes in football and basketball to D1 programs with larger NIL sponsorships, the State of the Ivy League athletics still looks very favorable overall for our being an academic oriented conference.
From my perspective, the Ivy League having so many varsity sports is a real advantage for the Ancient Eight. The Ivy League athletic programs average 34 varsity sports teams per school (17 men and 17 women) which is nearly double the 18 varsity sports per school average for the D1 athletic programs.
Next, let’s look at our varsity student athletes as a percentage of the student body. In the Ivy League, our student athletes represent close to 18 percent of the student body with Dartmouth having the highest percentage - about 25 percent of Big Green students are student athletes. If you include the 33 club sports at Dartmouth, the school estimates that a remarkable 75 percent of its student body is engaged in some form of organized athletics. Compare this to a SEC powerhouse like the University of Alabama that only has 8 varsity men’s sports teams and its total number of student athletes on campus is only 783 athletes or less than 2 percent of its student body. Most of our Ivy campuses have more varsity student athletes than Bama, despite being a small fraction of its size.
Yes, the Crimson of the South would crush the Crimson of the Northeast on the gridiron, as well as the Bama fan base is much larger and follow their teams more actively. Yet, if you analyze our athletic programs from a participation level, the Ivy League continues to have a rich athletic tradition on each of our campuses. The primary differences are that we have far more athletes on campus and that they also are just as likely to be from one of the Olympic sports (e.g., fencing, rowing, wrestling, volleyball, etc.) Most importantly, our athletes all graduate on time and they generally exceed at an even higher level in their professional careers compared to their accomplishments in their respective sports.
I’ll take the Ivy League athletic model any day over the typical D1 power program that serves such a small part of their student body in terms of athletic participation. The biggest failure is their alarmingly high number of athletes who do not graduate and are ill-prepared for their post-college lives .
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