"The academic index is a racist rule, whether it was intended to be one or not," Cingiser says. "It has minimized the number of Black student-athletes who can get into Ivy League schools."

Cingiser says that the AI's inclusion of the SAT scores are unfair to poorer students who cannot take test-taking classes to improve their SAT scores. Because of this bias against the poorer Blacks, Cingiser says that many of the Black student-athletes in the Ivy League come from the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum.

"We're becoming elitist again," Cingiser says. "We have cut down the number of Black kids we can get from poorer economic backgrounds. The League in general isn't getting those kids."

Most coaches adhere strictly to the index, so there is little hope of admission to one of the Ivies for a student-athlete who falls just under the cutoff point.

"If a kid's under it, we give up on him," Harvard Assistant Coach Steve Bzomowski says.

Another problem with the index is that it applies only to athletes. A talented musician or the child of an alumnus who falls slightly below the cutoff point still has a good chance of being admitted to an Ivy school, but a talented athlete with the same scores cannot. According to Cingiser, there have been times when basketball players who fell below the cutoff point could not be recruited by Brown even though they would have been admitted if they weren't athletes.

"The Academic Index categorizes kids too generally," Cormier says. "Sometimes a kid is hurt because he goes to a good school where his class rank is lower. The kid may still be qualified, but we can't look into those exceptions."

Cingiser himself, who was one of the finest basketball players in Brown history while maintaining a respectable level of academic success, noted that he would have fallen under the cutoff point if the Index had been in effect when he applied to college.

The result of the Academic Index is a sharp reduction in the number of basketball players that are eligible to play for Ivy League teams. "There's no doubt about it that the Al keeps our pool down," Cormier says. "All the Ivies are going after the same kids."

In the race for these students, some schools have an advantage over the others.

"If a parent is going to pay $18,000 a year to go to school, he's going to send his kid to Harvard or Yale," Cingiser says. "I don't necessarily think that the education he'll get at those schools is superior than the one he'll get here, but the prestige is greater. Last year there were 11 kids on Harvard's roster who we recruited and there were no kids on our roster whom Harvard recruited."

While Harvard and Yale may have an advantage over the other schools because of their academic reputations, other Ivy League schools have much stronger basketball traditions. Some students might prefer a Harvard education over a Penn education but others might prefer a basketball career at Penn or Princeton--which have won 25 of the last 29 Ivy crowns--rather than at Harvard--which has never won the title.

"The struggle for us is to show that we can do well athletically," Bzomowski says. "It's usually basketball prestige that takes the kids away."

That prestige often comes from outside the Ivy League as well. Bzomowski cites players that Harvard has lost to Villanova and Virginia because of their basketball programs.

But the Ivy League does not lose all the good basketball players to the Big East or the ACC. The top players on each team have turned down scholarship offers from schools around the nation to go to an Ivy League school.