Along the way, the intrepid columnist brings up an economic study that found, get this, that smart schools with less intelligent athletes do better in sports than smart schools with smart athletes. And, despite the simplicity of the result, Kuhls still gets the analysis wrong. It’s not that smarter students are worse athletes than “dumb” students as he says, rather it’s that the recruiting pool for more intelligent prospects is much smaller than that of less intelligent athletes, making it harder to build a strong team with the former instead of the latter.
After having already abandoned the intellectual highway for the dirt road, Kuhls drives his argument straight into a lake by rattling off a history of big time players and schools who have gotten themselves into hot water with the NCAA.
Yes, Dexter Manley was illiterate and still got into—and graduated from—Oklahoma State. And Maurice Clarett was a disaster. And Adrian Peterson exclusively prefers the latter half of the student-athlete tag.
But what the hell does this have to do with the Ivy League and athletic scholarships?
Nothing. Which is approximately how much Kuhls seems to know about this debate.
It’s unfair, however, to lace into another’s opinion without offering up one’s own. So, here goes.
I’m against offering athletic scholarships. It’s not a cost-effective solution to the Ivies’ attraction and retention problem.
In terms of football, joining the national-letter-of-intent-day, changing the recruiting policy from 30 per year to 120 per four years—in order to allow coaches to stock up in strong years and pass on weak classes, rather than having to take equal numbers from both—and allowing member schools to play an eleventhp game, have more spring practices and compete for a national title, would all be cheaper solutions that could progress toward the same goal.
That’s not to say that scholarships wouldn’t raise the quality of both the student and the athlete that the Ivies accept.
The increase in competitiveness of the league’s offer relative to that of comparable schools (Patriot teams and I-A squads like Vanderbilt, Duke and Stanford) would likely allow the Ivies to sign a slightly larger portion of their primary targets than they can under the current system. The cost would be substantial, however, and a similar gain could be made by instituting the aforementioned “free” rule changes that would make participation in Ivy athletics—specifically, football—more attractive.
Aside from the purely financial aspects, athletic scholarships would open up a Pandora’s Box of equality issues, wouldn’t do much to lock a student into a sport—due to the prevalence of financial aid for those who can’t afford the hefty price tag—and it could foster and extend the perceived gap between student-athletes and student-cellists, student-governors, student-journalists, and the like.
What they wouldn’t do is turn the Ivy League into anything close to the scandal-ridden, standard-lacking mess that Kuhls implies.
Such an assertion is as irresponsible as it is correct, and Kuhls’ audience deserves better.
—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.