Author:
 IvySportsJunkie
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Date Posted: 13:21:33 06/20/24 Thu
While there are merits to having freshmen teams, it is important to recognize how our Ivy football coaches have done an excellent job of integrating freshmen into their varsity teams.
The Ivy football coaches place a top priority on creating a profound sense of community within their respective teams. Commencing with the fall preseason before classes start, the coaches build into practices and team meetings a number of clever bonding activities. Each freshmen player is assigned an upper-class teammate to mentor the freshman related to academics, athletics and personal issues. They provide faculty advisors. They also offer regular faculty, industry professional and alumni informal presentations to players on a wide range of topics. Most importantly, the coaches have built a very deep network of alumni mentors who have achieved prominent positions in business, tech, law and other professional fields. These alumni commit be additional invaluable mentors the athletes and to help offer attractive summer intern positions.
Bottom line, the Ivy football players gain so much off the field during each of their college years, regardless of their respective playing time on the field. This is why the majority of players who have more limited playing time elect to not quit their varsity team.
To illustrate this point, let’s analyze a few of the Ivy football team rosters. The typical Ivy team recruits 27 players per annum or 108 players in a four-year period. In last year’s Harvard vs Yale football contest, the Yale roster had 116 players and the Harvard roster had 110 players. While you can adjust for about a dozen walk on and fifth season players on the roster, this would imply that Yale and Harvard retained about 90% of their recruited athletes for all four seasons. You will find similar results for the other six Ivy league football programs.
This is remarkably different at the vast majority of FBS football programs. The typical FBS program has at least two thirds of its recruited players leave their program before graduation. NIL and expanded transfer portal will only act to further accelerate the roster turnover at these FBS schools. When you speak to Ivy football players, especially the ones who earn less playing time, they tend to speak fondly of the intangibles that this Ivy experience offers.
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