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PATRIOT
GAMES
By Robert J. Bliwise ’76
Illustrations By Terry Stout
From the Allan P. Kirby Sports Center, Bruce McCutcheon
has been enjoying an unusual perspective on Lafayette athletics.
For several months, McCutcheon, the athletics director, was watching the renovation and transformation of Fisher Field,
just beyond his office, where the College’s home football games
have been played since 1926. At the same time, he was starting to implement the College’s historic shift to provide a limited number of athletic scholarships.
But for McCutcheon and others at Lafayette, the wider focus is on the athletics future—including the future of the Patriot League. “An issue for
the league since its inception has been stability,” he says. “It seems that the league has always been in a risk-management mode. There’s been one crisis after another,” particularly, he says, with a flux in membership.
“I think we’re finally in a period of stability.”
The question is, can Lafayette—and the league—
sustain and build on that stability?
The Patriot League began as a Division I-AA football conference in 1986 and became an all-sports conference four years later. Along with Lafayette, the current league members are American University, Army, Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lehigh, and Navy.
Last fall, just months after assuming office, President Dan Weiss formed a working group of faculty members, students, alumni, and administrators to consider issues with Lafayette athletics. Among the recommendations, announced in February, was to help strengthen the Patriot League. “Many of us, myself included, believe that the Patriot League can be a source of great competitive advantage for its members,” Weiss says.
The Patriot League’s executive director, Carolyn Schlie Femovich, says the league is distinguished by a set of common values. There’s a shared belief, she says, that “athletics are an integral part of an educational experience, but they need to be a complementary part, not a driving force. Our people believe that academic values and athletic values can be and must be compatible, that there does not have to be a contradiction between high achievement in the classroom and success in athletics.” As an example of that principle in action, she mentions the so-called Academic Index, a formula that compares the academic profile of admitted athletes with the profile of students at large. The index is computed for every school within the league and then shared with the group of presidents.
The league’s schools, she says, continue to enhance
their academic reputations. And that makes it “very challenging to identify a quality pool of athletes who can be successful in terms of academic qualifications.” The challenge is complicated, she adds, when the competition includes Ivy League schools.
In some ways, Lafayette’s position in the league has become more fragile, given the College’s position as the smallest school in the league. As McCutcheon notes,
“We have a small student body, even though we’re offering twenty-three varsity sports. We spend more than anybody else in the league as a percentage of the College’s overall operating budget. But in terms of actual dollars, we are far below what our colleagues around the league are spending on their programs.” So McCutcheon is leading an extensive effort to examine each sport at Lafayette,
how it conforms to larger goals for the athletics program, and how its financial requirements might be met. Inevitably, he’s going through that exercise mindful not just of the Lafayette landscape but also of the context
of the Patriot League.
“When it was founded, the Patriot League was supposed to be a kind of sister league to the Ivy League,” McCutcheon says. “But that’s been eroded, in part because of athletic scholarships.” Holy Cross started awarding scholarships in basketball in the fall of 1998—
the first move to athletic aid above need in the Patriot League. That sparked a league-wide trend. Lafayette’s own shift to scholarships would not have been the preference of most athletics working-group members or faculty members, says Susan Averett, a professor of economics
and business who served on the working group. But, as she puts it, “It’s pretty tough to compete in the league when you’re the lone holdout against scholarships.”
Colleges have to respond to realities of the marketplace, says Femovich, who came to the league as executive director in 1999, after many years as an athletics administrator at the University of Pennsylvania. “The reality is the brightest and the best student-athletes are going to be attracted to institutions that provide them with some financial reward. It may not be their only reason for going there. But when they have many choices, the dollars do come into play and make a difference.
None of us can exist in a vacuum. We’re all influenced by what the competition is doing, whether it’s the competition within the league or outside.”
Within Lafayette, Averett says one factor in rationalizing athletic scholarships was an assumption about their academic impact. The scholarships, the assumption goes, will improve the academic standing of student-athletes. That’s because they will enlarge the pool from which Lafayette can draw the students who conform to its academic profile. “Certainly that’s what other schools in the Patriot League were saying when we talked with them—that this is a way to get students who are better prepared academically and who are better athletes.
We’ll have to wait to see the impact. Here, it seems like kind of an open question.”
But if the assumption is correct, the addition of athletic scholarships could help address one of the findings of the athletics working group—that a disproportionate share of recruited athletes fall on the weaker end of the admissions scale. While concerned about the disparity, members of
the working group also point out that many student-athletes stand out as academic achievers and have made impressive marks as campus leaders.
In basketball especially, where student-athletes can
look to full rides, Lafayette has lost many battles to scholarship schools, says McCutcheon. “Both on the men’s side and the women’s side, when we’re involved with the high-quality student and the high-quality athlete, seldom have we won that battle over a school that was providing a scholarship. In many cases, when our coaches learned that scholarship programs were involved in the recruiting process, they just backed off. You need to put your resources in play where they’re going to bear fruit.”
No school in the Patriot League awards athletic scholarships in football. Still, acknowledges Weiss—who, before assuming the Lafayette presidency, helped oversee athletics as Arts & Sciences dean at Johns Hopkins University—it’s a challenge to level the playing field when American University is offering scholarships in nine sports and Colgate in eleven sports. “I don’t think we’re in a state of affairs that is sustainable over the long term,” says Weiss. “The question is, what kind of league are we going to put in place? At the moment, the most immediate pressure on us was in basketball,” because every other school in the league already awarded basketball scholarships. But in some other sports, “we thought we had a chance to differentiate ourselves,” he says. So at Lafayette, men’s and women’s basketball will receive three full athletic scholarships, beginning this fall. The next academic year will extend athletic scholarships to men’s soccer and women’s field hockey. In both sports, coaches will have the flexibility to distribute financial-aid funds in awarding grants beyond need.
One need of the Patriot League, according to the athletics working group, is a sharper identity, one akin to the Ivy League. Only five of the eight members of the Patriot League play Division I-AA football; one of them, American University, doesn’t field a football team, and the service academies play Division I-A football. Before the league became an all-sports conference in the 1990-91 academic year, Davidson dropped out completely, which, many agree, was a major blow. Later, Fordham, Army, and Navy joined in sports other than football. More recently, Fordham became an associate member, just for football. Georgetown is also a football associate. This year was Villanova’s last season as an associate member of the League in women’s lacrosse.
“You have schools coming and going and joining
for maybe one sport and maybe not another, and that’s completely different from the Ivy League,” says
Eric Ziolkowski, Dana Professor of religious studies and another member of the athletics working group. “Ivy League membership has not changed in fifty years. And all the Ivy institutions compete in the same sports. If you look at the history of the Patriot League, the frequent changes in membership are actually quite remarkable.”
The Patriot League was founded with “a really lofty vision,” says Ziolkowski. “It was so lofty that the idea was that other schools around the country would eventually follow the same model, and there would be kind of a mutual disarmament in recruiting as a result. Obviously, none of that was realized since the late 1980s.”
According to its founding principles, Ziolkowski notes, the league “would be controlled by presidents and not athletics directors. Financial aid would be need-based exclusively. Athletes would be representatives of the general student body.” In their recent analysis of league dynamics, members of the working group found that the league “had slipped very much out of the control of presidents,” he says, “and it was being influenced inordinately by athletics directors.” With diminished presidential oversight and the awarding of athletic scholarships, “two of the three founding principles were certainly not being adhered to,” he adds. “The third
was subject to debate.”
Not only did the Patriot League try to emulate the Ivy League; early on, the two conferences had a series of contractual arrangements for scheduling games. One attraction for the Patriot League, of course, was that the schools would “benefit from the media exposure gained by competition with the Ivies,” Ziolkowski says. That exposure would reinforce the philosophical affinities between the two leagues. But the Patriot League was not the Ivy League, and the idea of strict emulation was probably unrealistic from the start. “We recognized the sheer fact of the cachet of the Ivy League. No Ivy League president is ever going to threaten to leave the Ivy League because he or she wants to give athletic scholarships and the other schools don’t.”
The culture of the Ivy League wouldn’t allow such a threat, Ziolkowski says—a view strongly confirmed by its executive director, Jeff Orleans, who says that, to his knowledge, no Ivy president has ever recommended compromising any of the founding “bedrock principles.” Orleans adds that “while sometimes for individual coaches it might be a little frustrating” to adhere to admission and financial-aid standards, “I think it’s helpful that we know who we are. Maybe we could be athletically better if we were different. But what makes our successes worthwhile is that we’re succeeding within our framework.”
It’s not the case that the Ivies have lots of other options in seeking like-minded schools: In Division I,
the Ivies are alone in not awarding athletic scholarships. Still, it’s far from a sure thing that even a reinvented,
re-energized Patriot League could look to tighter bonds with the Ivy League. According to Orleans of the Ivy League, “Our relations with the Patriots are as close as they are with anyone else, and probably closer.” There are frequent points of contact between the leagues. And a cadre of football and men’s basketball officials works both leagues. But, he adds, “Aside from the kind of formal agreements that the bowl-championship folks have, where somebody’s first-place team plays somebody’s second-place team at some point, it’s very rare to have extensive, formal league interactions. That’s true even for leagues that are geographically entwined, the way our two leagues are.”
The future ties between the conferences, he says, are likely to hinge on pairs of institutions. “These relationships are healthier when schools decide, for whatever reason, that they’re either going to play each other more consistently or, if they’ve not played each other in the past, they’re going to develop a relationship.” And he’s not so sure that the Patriot League, or any league, should be looking to emulate the Ivy League. “The relationships among schools, the traditions, the objectives are not going to be the same from one group of schools to another. What the Big Ten does, which is a perfectly valid model for college athletics, is not valid for us, or is not seen as valid for us. There’s no a priori reason why our model in particular should be valid for anybody else.”
Just over a year into his Lafayette presidency, Dan
Weiss is aiming to help create a more valid and viable model for the Patriot League. He’s leading an effort among league presidents to craft a strategic vision, to “strengthen the league’s strategic position and visibility,” as he puts it. That will probably involve expanding the membership, he says. Growth in membership would help in scheduling opponents, and would also promote stability. “I think the league should be slightly larger. And I think we should aspire to having strong academic-athletic partners that resemble us.”
“Can we aspire to having an identity that is similar to the Ivy League? I think we can, in some ways, certainly in terms of academic standards and keeping athletics in proportion while playing at the Division I level. But part of the work ahead is to articulate at a more substantive level what that will actually mean.”
As the planning proceeds, McCutcheon, the athletics director, says he feels good about the trajectory of the College’s athletics program. In the last academic year, he says, Lafayette compiled its best overall win-loss percentage since the 1990-91 season. And Lafayette certainly did well within its league, with two notable milestones during a single week last fall. The football
team laid claim to back-to-back championships with a win over archrival Lehigh. And on the soccer field, the Lafayette men earned their sixth Patriot League championship and their second in three years.
Of course, the Patriot League is about more than awarding championships. The league is “a great collection of schools, like-minded in the kind of students they
want representing the institutions and the caliber of
play they expect from those students,” McCutcheon
says. “The league was founded on the principle of presidential control. What would help it now is having those presidents take ownership of it.”
Bliwise ’76, a former editor of this magazine, is editor
of Duke Magazine and teaches magazine journalism
at Duke University.
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