How About a New Conference for Vandy?
And so another college football season is officially over. And with it, Vanderbilt University’s squad stumbles into the annals of history. Perhaps now is an appropriate time to ask:
Why does Vanderbilt, one of the finest academic institutions in the country and easily one of the 10 most respected undergraduate institutions outside of the Ivy League, offer itself up week after week for ritual humiliation and slaughter by state-sponsored football factories?
The answer is money, and not from alumni excited by Vandy having beaten Furman and Connecticut. It’s bowl money and lots of it—this for a team that last played in a bowl game in the early ’80s. It’s a fact that when the rest of the SEC schools play in bowl games, Vanderbilt’s athletic department is showered with serious dollars, because bowl game revenues are redistributed to conference members. We’re talking almost $8 million last year.
So, in other words, it quite literally pays for the school to be the butt of hilarity and sarcasm on ESPN, not to mention an amusing weekend jaunt for opponents, because that means the school doesn’t have to worry about covering bus fare for the soccer team.
But the tension in this situation is not sustainable for the long term.
Where exactly in Vanderbilt’s mission statement does the phrase “Lose football games for money” appear? There is, of course, an alternative. After all, the Ivy League includes the richest and most prestigious schools in the country, yet none of them goes to any football bowl games or ever gets to play on national television. How can they manage this amazing feat? Is it possible that economic success for an academic institution can be derived from something other than TV revenues from the Bowl Championship Series?
For generations, the Ivy League has produced the leaders of northeastern society in business, politics and academia. Its academic superiority has led to phenomenal marketing and financial success. But there’s an irony to this that reflects on Vanderbilt’s situation: The Ivy League began as a football conference. Members got together to play football because they saw themselves as peers who were competing with each other for the same students, faculty and prestige.
The answer for Vanderbilt is staring it in the face. Even as the school tries to improve the quality and reputation of its undergraduate program, it should take a look at the list of schools with whom it competes for students and start a league with them. These are the academically strong colleges like Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Tulane and the military academies. (Sports aficionados may have detected a correlation between the strength of these schools’ academic programs and the weakness of their football programs.)
While Vanderbilt’s record for conference futility is remarkable—it has won one conference game out of its last 26—Vandy has nothing on Duke, which has now lost 24 conference games in a row. Northwestern, after a very brief, almost freakish burst in the mid-’90s into the top ranks of the Big 10, returned to form with a conference record of 1-6 this year. Tulane, playing in something called Conference USA, racked up a conference mark of 3-4, beating UAB, Cincinnati and Southern Mississippi, three schools that probably few Tulane undergrads seriously consider attending.
In that same conference, Army handed over its sword, racking up a 1-6 mark (the lone victory coming in fact against Tulane). Meanwhile, the Rice Owls, based out of Houston, compete in the Western Athletic Conference that includes Boise State and Hawaii. Rice was 3-5, beating Louisiana Tech, Tulsa and UTEP. Who cares?
It’s also worth considering the undergraduate populations (as published in U.S. News & World Report) at the schools and the average undergraduate populations in their particular conferences. Vanderbilt’s undergraduate population is approximately 6,000; the average population at SEC schools is 18,000. Those numbers are 3,000/13,000 at Rice, 7,500/17,000 at Tulane, 6,203/14,000 at Duke, 4,173/17,000 at Army and 7,800/29,000 at Northwestern. (Navy has 4,297 undergraduate students and isn’t affiliated with a conference.) So there would be population parity in this conference, much more parity than now exists between these schools and their existing conferences.
The test scores jibe nicely too. According to U.S. News, Vanderbilt students have average SAT scores of 1230-1400, while the SEC average is 950-1100. The SAT averages at the schools mentioned above are similarly skewed with their respective conferences.
As for these football teams’ national ratings, it looks like there may be athletic parity in such a new conference as well. After all, they’re pretty far down the Division I totem poll. According to one computer rating service, Tulane ended its season at 63, Northwestern at 86, Rice at 99, Duke at 100, Vanderbilt at 101, Navy at 108 and Army at 116.
It looks like we got us some teams to play against. So what are we waiting for?
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