The Bobcat Nation

Had an interesting conversation last week with a Yale fan. I asked how hard they think they will get hit with players going in the portal and the battle with NIL. He told me that there have been several Ivy league players that have been approached but stayed just because the degree is worth more than the NIL. Yale's average starting salary is right at $100,000. If they are in pre med or law its closer to $200,000. That's a huge advantage. I see the Ivy league becoming a conference to reckon with if the schools want to get competitive.
I joked with him and said for them they should only be able to participate in athletics if the carry a B- or lower. lol

Yale has a $40+ Billion dollar endowment. If they wanted to invest in football, they could instantly compete with anyone.

wbtfg wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 10, 2025 10:12 pm

Yale has a $40+ Billion dollar endowment. If they wanted to invest in football, they could instantly compete with anyone.

They would have to drastically lower their admissions standards to “compete with anyone” and that’s just never going to happen.

PapaG wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 11, 2025 7:17 am

wbtfg wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 10, 2025 10:12 pm

Yale has a $40+ Billion dollar endowment. If they wanted to invest in football, they could instantly compete with anyone.

They would have to drastically lower their admissions standards to “compete with anyone” and that’s just never going to happen.

I would not be surprised if some of their standards are flexible when it comes to legacy applications and filling certain quotas. All they have to do is apply some flexibility for a dozen or so football players.

A couple of points that may be interesting to you about this.

NIL/Portal have net hurt the Ivy League. As of now, there's not been an appetite to pay a bunch of NIL money, but no prohibitions against it. None of the teams opted into the House Settlement so no revenue sharing. This on top of no scholarships and the 4 year/graduation limitation make it a little tough from that perspective.

Certainly players can and have transferred out, some for a higher level of play and some for $, but getting transfers in, is more difficult making the portal more of a one way street. Not impossible, but harder. I mentioned on another thread a G5 player that would have graduated at his school May of 26, came in as a sophomore, again no scholarship.

Regarding admissions, the Ivy League uses an Academic Index for recruiting. Basically they try to keep the athletic teams looking close to the regular student admittance pool. This is a copy/paste job but does a better job explaining the process than I could.


If you have an Academic Index below 171, you cannot be admitted to an Ivy League school as an athlete.

For those at or above 171, the meaning of the Academic Index varies from school to school.

To precisely determine an athlete’s recruitability, the Ivy League segments all A.I.s above 171 into four “bands.” something like A, B, C, D, with A being the highest band. Using this system, an Ivy League school like Harvard, with a high Academic Index of 220 and a standard deviation of 14 would have its bands defined as follows: High: 197-210, Med: 183-196, Low: 176-182, Low-Low: 171-175.

Ivy League schools rarely, if ever, publish their mean A.I.s. It is assumed, however, that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (in that order) have the three highest mean figures, probably at or around 220. According to the book, "Playing the Game," Dartmouth usually falls fourth at approximately 212, followed (in order) by Columbia, Pennsylvania, Brown, and Cornell.

Under the rules of the system, no school can admit more than 30 football players per year. Moreover, the schools must specifically show that prescribed numbers of recruited players fall into the bands as follows:

High band: 8 players
Med. band: 13 players
Low band: 7 players
Low-Low: 2 players
In general, however, the following is also true about the meaning of your A.I.:

1. The lower your band, the better you must be as an athlete.

2. Students who fall in the “low-low” band need to be exceptional athletes (all-state caliber players who are being recruited by Michigan or Ohio State, for example).

3. Students with A.I.s above 220 stand a better chance of being recruited, and needn’t be All-State caliber players. In fact, some Ivies have been known to pad their teams’ Academic Indices by recruiting football players with 1550 SAT scores and virtually no chance of ever seeing game action.

4. In football, offensive linemen are often recruited in the medium and high bands. Low-low bands are most often reserved for impact players: quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers.

5. Ivy admissions are tough, even for recruited athletes. All Ivy League schools start with a pool of more than a thousand players, and then whittle that pool down to 30. A typical “low-low,” therefore, will be in the top quarter of his high school class, with a 27 on the ACT (1220 SAT), and will be a first-team all-stater or even a high school All-American caliber player. A typical “high” might still be an all-conference caliber player with a 33+ ACT (1460+ SAT) and a top 5% ranking.



Finally, remember that the formula presented here is a rough approximation used by coaches. Ivy admissions officers typically want prospective students to take the SAT 2 exam before calculating their “real” Academic Index.



https://www.ivyleagueguru.com/calculate-index

Looked up their A I calculator… They were talking about your eliniblity. I guess the person that typed it out is not qualified to play football in the Ivy Leagues. A big whoops.