Lyons quickly saw players that would have fit into some of the lower bands just a few years earlier fall well below the AI floor, and he knew that the talent level of the Big Green program would soon begin to fall as well. This monumental change was exogenous to the football program and should have been mitigated by the admissions office offering more generous financial aid packages (to rival the initial packages offered by traditional big-spenders like Princeton, Harvard and Yale, which have a greater pool of monetary resources to draw from), and admitting a higher percentage of the student-athletes that qualified under the AI banding system. The administration didn’t, and the Big Green quickly lost the ability to compete with other Ivy schools, going 12-37 in the league play since 1998.

Furstenberg’s letter clearly lays out a philosophical approach to football that would be consistent with such a drop off in admissions department support for the program.

But maybe Lyons summed it up best after being shown a copy of the letter by The Valley News.

“What was he thinking?” Lyons said.

And that question is becoming an ever more applicable response to whoever would want to take the Big Green coaching job.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears every Tuesday.