Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 13:31:46 01/10/26 Sat
observer, here's where I agree with you and where I do not:
You're absolutely correct that not everyone matriculating at an Ivy League university is highly intelligent. If your parent has donated, say, $25 million to alma mater, you are probably going to be judged leniently when you apply.
Overall, except for a handful of kids from really rich families, athletes and underrepresented minorities have historically been the students with the worst academic profiles. The latter may be changing as some of the Ivies cut way back on black and brown students. Since losing its Supreme Court case, Harvard has cut its number of accepted African American applicants in half.
So you're correct that athletes will likely be, on average, among the worst students on any Ivy campus -- any Ivy. We agree on that.
But what's the most appropriate yardstick here?
Is the only relevant standard other Ivy League students? I'd say "no."
There are two relevant standards at play in our current analysis. The first is other Ivy students and, here, the AI -- assuming for the time being that it's being applied honestly and fairly -- keeps the bulk of Ivy athletes within one standard deviation of the overall mean on campus.
(There's a separate issue that Ivy students no longer fit a normal distribution curve because the top end of the curve has been truncated by the dumbing down of the SAT in 1999.)
But the most relevant standard for Ivy athletes in this current thread is **NOT** other Ivy students, it's other Division I athletes.
I'll repeat that for effect. The standard here is other Division I athletes.
In the NIL/transfer portal era, Division I athletes will get dumber and dumber.
I hope you enjoyed listening to Fernando Mendoza after last night's Oregon game. You're going to see fewer and fewer of his type in the future, the Yale-bound guy who speaks in complete sentences jammed with words like "synergy" and "composite."
Our Ivy athletes will be subject to a more and more stringent screen compared to other Division I athletes. We're going to be holding our guys to a higher and higher standard, not lower.
It will be harder and harder for us to succeed in Division I football and men's basketball writ large. We're in a good spot right now. That's subject to change as the ice floes shift all around us. But for now:
Almost all of our sports teams are competitive at the Division I level. Our athletes are real students. They may well be the dumbest ones on campus, but they're legitimate dumb Ivy League students.
We don't need to be ashamed of them (yet), we can and should be proud of them.
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