Osler's Razor

I'll be honest: I love watching college football; it's my favorite spectator sport. I have season tickets for Baylor, and break my usual Saturday schedule for those 12 great Saturdays in the fall to keep track of what is going on. I love the fact that college football is part of the identity of a school, and I know what that means. What I don't think, though, is that college football at the Division I-A level correlates in any way with a school's academic reputation, or that a good team (in the long run) makes a school much better. Certainly, a good football program can help achieve some definite short-term goals: For example, at Baylor, a strong football program would help attract more male students (addressing a gender imbalance), and a huge season usually results in more applications. In the long-term, though, most football programs can't be justified by saying it makes the school better.

If you really think there is a correlation between academic quality and football prowess, just consider this list of the top 20 undergraduate institutions in the US (it's the 2008 U.S. News List for national universities, the grouping that includes most of the Division I-A football schools). ALL of those 20 academic powerhouses with a football team are either in Division III, Division I-AA, or seem mired in perpetual football mediocrity:

1) Princeton (I-AA)
2) Harvard (I-AA)
3) Yale (I-AA)
4) Stanford (devoted to perpetual mediocrity)
5) Penn (I-AA)
6) Cal Tech (Div. III)
7) MIT (Div. III-- would be Div. IV if there was one)
8) Duke (devoted to, and achieving with spectacular results, perpetual mediocrity)
9) Columbia (I-AA)
10) Chicago (Div. III)
11) Dartmouth (Div. I-AA)
12) Washington Univ (Missouri) (Div. III)
13) Cornell (Div. I-AA)
14) Brown (Div. I-AA)
15) Northwestern (devoted to perpetual mediocrity)
16) Johns Hopkins (Div. III)
17) Rice (devoted to perpetual mediocrity)
18) Emory (No team)
19) Vanderbilt (devoted to perpetual mediocrity)
20 Notre Dame (as of this year, devoted to perpetual mediocrity)

Doesn't the fact that (as of today) the lists of the top 20 academic schools and the top 20 football schools have no overlap whatsoever-- that not one team appears on both lists? I'm no mathematician, but the odds are very much against that, if there is anything close to a random distribution.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this list, it is that what works for a strong academic institution is to ally yourself with other good schools that aren't so good at football. Remember, the Ivy League is a sports league. It is a huge benefit to Brown, for example, to play so-so football against Harvard and Yale every year. Their association with those academic powerhouses bolsters their academic credibility in a way Baylor's association with, say, Kansas State does not.

Who is not in the academic top 20 anymore? Texas. Michigan. Hmmm.

What would it be like to have a league with Vanderbilt, Rice, Baylor, SMU, Duke, Northwestern, and UVA? Could it be good for Baylor?