Aaron asks:
I want to know why and when the Ivy League football hegemony ceased, and why paternalistic white guys with old money haven’t bankrolled more scholarships to attract stellar athletic (but subpar academic) talent.
For one thing, Ryan Fitzpatrick is the best quarterback in the NFL, so don’t say Ivy League hegemony is dead!
More seriously, Ivy League football hegemony’s demise was the result of a suicide pact. The Ivy League schools collectively ban merit scholarships of all kinds, including for athletes, and have various rules in place about the academic standards their athletic programs need to meet. Because the schools still give out plenty of need-based financial aid, and most certainly do give recruited athletes a boost in the admissions process, they can often put together really stellar teams in sports that aren’t the subject of big money recruitment elsewhere. When I was in college, for example, Harvard assembled a ridiculously dominant women’s ice hockey team that featured a whole bunch of medal winners in the 2002 Olympics. But football’s not like that and you can’t compete with what are, in effect, professional teams within the self-imposed constraints of the Ivy League.
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