Ivy League Basketball: A Shooting Star

When David fought Goliath he had an easier time than when Ivy League teams play in the NCAA basketball tournament. In the first round of the 1988 tourney, the score was Arizona 90, Ivy League Champion Cornell 50. The year before, North Carolina crushed Penn, 113-82. In 1986, Syracuse beat Brown by 49 points.

During the regular season, Ivy teams were regularly crushed by stronger non-league opponents. Duke 121, Harvard 62. Indiana 94, Penn 54. Temple 84, Penn 50. Wyoming 92, Columbia 56. Ivy League basketball teams are simply outmatched by teams from stronger basketball conferences like the Big East, the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big 10.

It hasn't always been that way. In 1942 and 1944, Dartmouth played in national championship games. Even as recently as 1979, Penn went to the Final Four before falling to Magic Johnson and Michigan State. But now, according to league coaches, the Ivy League is unable to compete with the stronger conferences. Ivy teams are invited to play major teams which are looking for easy wins to pad their records.

"Everyone knows that there are two levels of basketball in Division I," Columbia Coach Wally Halas says. "One is a pre-professional program, and the other has college basketball as something that happens on a college campus. Schools have chosen different routes, and there certainly is a wide gap between them."

The decline of Ivy League basketball in relation to the top conferences has been self-inflicted, some coaches say. By refusing to award athletic scholarships or stipends and by holding extremely rigid academic standards, the Ivy League keeps itself out of the bidding for the top athletes in basketball.

In many ways the Ivy League more closely resembles a Division III conference than a Division I conference. Division III teams do not offer scholarships, can schedule a limited number of games and are forbidden to begin practicing before a certain date, three characteristics unique to the Ivy League in Division I.

"All I know is that if you quack and you waddle you're a duck," Brown Coach Mike Cingiser says. "We can pretend we're really Division I schools, but in reality we're still a duck. If you look at what we are, we're a Division III school. The first round of the NCAA tournament is the first day of duck hunting season. We are a quack in Division I."

Halas, who just completed his first year at Columbia after coaching at Division III Clark for 13 years, agrees. "There's not much difference between the Ivy League and Division III]," he says. "It's entirely the same regarding the lack of scholarships. All financial assistance is need-based."

The main difference is that Division III schools do not cost $18,000 per year. Some outstanding student-athletes are faced with a difficult choice when they consider their college educations. They can risk bankruptcy to go to an Ivy League school or they can accept an athletic scholarship from a school with lower academic standards.

"The financial situation is very difficult," Dartmouth Coach Paul Cormier says. "Tuitions are continually going up. As it becomes economically infeasible, parents have to look away."

Fortunately, the Ivy League schools give a great deal of financial assistance to those students who are in dire economic straits. Sometimes, that aid is enough to match the scholarship offers coming from other institutions. But the assistance is frequently not enough for those who come from middle-income backgrounds.

"I find myself being able to recruit the very rich or the very poor," Cingiser says. "The middle income kids get killed."

The lack of scholarships is not the only hinderance coaches face when trying to recruit athletes. The student-athletes must be expected to perform in the classroom as well as on the court. To facilitate the determination of whether the student is a legitimate Ivy League student, an Academic Index (AI)--composed of class rank, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Achievement Test scores--has been devised for athletes. Anyone falling below the cutoff point of 161 may not be recruited by Ivy coaches.

"I think the premise is a good one," Harvard Coach Pete Roby said.

But while the principle behind the Al may be noble, some coaches claim that the results are not.

"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.

"If you are a kid that isn't going to go pro, then how can you pass up the Ivy League education?" says Yale Assistant Coach Garry Mantel. "We lost a kid this year to a full ride at Michigan, but we're also recruiting someone who has turned down a lot of big-time offers to play Ivy League basketball. That doesn't happen every day, but it happens enough to make us feel good about our situation."

Another factor attracting players to the Ivy League is that it is the last conference that truly consists solely of student-athletes.

"When they choose an Ivy league school, it's for the right reason," Cormier says.

And that goes for coaches as well as players. Most coaches feel more comfortable in a situation where they can relate to players on an intellectual level, as well as an athletic level.

"I wouldn't trade my position for a place in one of those other conferences," Halas says. "I prefer a situation where a balance between basketball and academics is achieved."

Those factors may be responsible for why the Ivy League does fairly well against schools near the bottom of Division I basketball despite the disadvantages. Not every team is a Duke or an Arizona. In the 1987-88 season, Ivy teams boasted of victories over scholarship schools like New Hampshire, Vermont, Holy Cross, Texas, San Francisco, Rutgers and Seton Hall.

"We did well outside the league against a number of conferences," Cingiser says. "I don't think we are that far from a number of schools that give scholarships, but I think we're going to pull further and further away from them."

The Ivy League already suffers from a lack of basketball respect. The conference champ is always seeded last in its region in the NCAA tourney, partly because it is assumed that the level of competition in the Ivy League is much lower than in other conferences. The result is that the Ivy League champ has to face the very best teams in the nation--the Syracuses, North Carolinas and Arizonas. As long as the Ivy League continues to adhere strictly to the Academic Index and allow top basketball players to be lured away to other schools by scholarships, the League will continue to decline, coaches say.

The alternative is to compromise the purity of study and competition that the Ivy League is supposed to represent. Many presidents and athletic directors strongly oppose a relaxation of academic standards or the awarding of athletic scholarships. But some coaches argue that the purity of the Ivy League has already been lost.

"We are mired down in hypocrisy," Cingiser said. "The Ivy League is supposed to emphasize the importance of participating, not winning. In my seven years as a coach here, there have been 15 coaching changes in the Ivies. Not all, but most were related to the winning thing."

"For a lot of us," he adds, "the expectation is an eight and the tools we have are a five."