WOW, if there is height/athleticism in your family, have your kid play football

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:So surprised people are so skeptical. It really is happening. Son’s friend played travel soccer for years as goalie and field player, rec basketball (has been asked to try out by many club basketball teams), summer swim team, and other rec sports. He had always been very tall, built, and is fast. Always excelled in sports.

He started playing in football for the first time in hs. He was over 6 foot as a freshman and has great foot skills from soccer. Started playing varsity football as a freshman. This was right after COVID so not sure how that affected how many varsity spots. He is being recruited now by top schools. He is smart and taking the mainly the most rigorous path but not perfect straight A’s. He is 6’4”. He is absolutely being recruited by Ivy League football teams and other top universities as a junior.

Yep, I know another kid like this. Athletic, tall (6'3"?) lacrosse player. Started playing football in 9th grade. Joined varsity in 11th. Now a rising senior and he's going to all the summer football camps and has his first Ivy offer. Grades are good but not perfect and low rigor. Top prep school.

There are also so, so few boys in the better publics and privates playing football these days. It's walk-on everywhere. Most athletic boys are choosing other sports. Yet every college has a football team and needs the bodies. So academic standards will continue to decline for the smarter football players. There just aren't a lot of them. It's a definite hook, but the tradeoffs are high. But Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth still need players that can function in a classroom. And there are so few football players now generally, particularly those that have the basic academic chops for the better schools. Obviously the really good football players are going to Georgia or Texas or other major schools. So you don't even need to be particularly good for an Ivy League school.

Hold on. We need a little perspective here - a power 5 football player is a freak of nature. Almost every power 5 stater is going to be in his highschool’s hall of fame. A recruited player at an Ivy is still a damn good player- multi-year starter and probably made all district and all regional teams as a sophomore or junior. Most will make all state or all met as a senior. That’s not power 5 but a long way from “not being particularly good.”

The prior poster has it correct

I said it above: OP is a troll, liar, or misunderstands the facts. Her post, however, is 100% false.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UVA, Duke and BC are in a power 5 conference and heads and tails above the rest of the schools mentioned. Aside from a few obscure sports the Ivy is advanced HS that don't belong in the D1 for football, baseball, or BB. Watch the Harvard Princeton football game next year, there are 100 people in the stands, all parents.

A lot of alumni go to the Harvard Brown game and take their kids and grandkids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Much better odds for ice hockey and lacrosse players: https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/3/2/estimated-probability-of-competing-in-college-athletics.aspx

But you're not going to learn lacrosse overnight. The thing with these football players is that they barely even play football. They started in 9th grade (if that). The Ivy lacrosse recruits have put in a decade of travel lacrosse. That is a LOT of tournaments and a lot of money.

The talented athletes pick up football and lacrosse easily and they don’t need a travel team at 5 years old to be good enough to be recruited. Lacrosse is easy to pick up in 9th grade and play varsity in high school.

The tournaments and too much money spent is parents signing their kids up trying to make their average kid an athlete. Those travel teams are made up of over 90% of kids who will never be good enough for college lacrosse.

Have you played?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Much better odds for ice hockey and lacrosse players: https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/3/2/estimated-probability-of-competing-in-college-athletics.aspx

But you're not going to learn lacrosse overnight. The thing with these football players is that they barely even play football. They started in 9th grade (if that). The Ivy lacrosse recruits have put in a decade of travel lacrosse. That is a LOT of tournaments and a lot of money.

Most Ivy League football recruits have also played the sport for years. It’s only the freakishly large kids who are taken with little to no experience. Not many of us have 6’5 kids weighing over 250 lbs.

No they aren’t taken kids with no experience because of height over the 6’5” kids who have excelled at football all through high school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No concussion for my kids, thanks, OP. I'd rather pay full price for a less reputable university than have my kids play football.

The thing is that the kid doesn't actually have to play football once they get to the Ivy. They just have to play enough to get in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No thanks. We like their brains. They do crew.

Crew is great for non athletic kids. It gets you in shape. But the natural athletes wouldn’t be satisfied with just that because it’s safe.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My son goes to a top academic private school that also has a football team.
He has friends (from this school and an almost identical one) who have football offers from Duke, UVA, Cornell, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Boston College (these are all different kids and some have multiple offers, not listed). They are mostly white.
They're smart enough---GPAs around 3.5---or middle-of-the-pack for the grade--- and they play football well enough (nothing spectacular or all-state but they're tall and athletic).
However, the elite universities are THRILLED to take these kids because they can do the academic work and fill a spot on their football roster.
The kids are literally choosing their colleges.

Meanwhile the academic kids in the grade are killing themselves to get a 3.9 for some chance at getting into a top school on grades, scores, extracurriculars.

Moral of the story: if you have height and athleticism in your family--have your kid play football. Better yet: have them attend an elite private too. They'll walk into an Ivy and won't have to sweat out the grades.

No brainer here. I would rather pick a well rounded athletic and smart kid than a geek for sure!

That is really concerning. Anti-intellectualism once again making its round on DCUM

Intellectualism hasn’t really worked for the world so far.

New poster here. Intellectual, knowledgeable, and ethical people are the only group preventing global war, but you're too stupid to comprehend their incremental and behind-the-scenes efforts.

Nice new post calling people stupid. You are wrong. You don’t think Putin is intellectual with an amazing command of world history?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Adding there is a definite racial bias in this thread. If you don’t know any kids playing football, perhaps you don’t know any kids of different races or ethnicities of your own.

+100

Expect no different from this site.

[Anonymous]

what about all the concussions tho?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Much better odds for ice hockey and lacrosse players: https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/3/2/estimated-probability-of-competing-in-college-athletics.aspx

But you're not going to learn lacrosse overnight. The thing with these football players is that they barely even play football. They started in 9th grade (if that). The Ivy lacrosse recruits have put in a decade of travel lacrosse. That is a LOT of tournaments and a lot of money.

The talented athletes pick up football and lacrosse easily and they don’t need a travel team at 5 years old to be good enough to be recruited. Lacrosse is easy to pick up in 9th grade and play varsity in high school.

The tournaments and too much money spent is parents signing their kids up trying to make their average kid an athlete. Those travel teams are made up of over 90% of kids who will never be good enough for college lacrosse.

Have you played?

Not in a good conference like the MIAA Aconference. My son started playing in middle school and that is the latest of any kid that plays for his school. Maybe VA public school lacrosse, but very few of those kids are being recruited.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:what about all the concussions tho?

Do you have a concussion by typing "tho" ? JK

I played football, basketball and baseball in HS and in to my college years. This was back in the late 80's early 90s. Back then, coaches would just say "you just got your bell rung" , get back out there. I had 11 confirmed concussions back then, often loosing conscious and needing smelling salt to "revive".

My kid has already been diagnosed with 5. None from football.

I will say that our fancy private has the new tech in their helmets to know the amount of hits they get to the head and the intensity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:what about all the concussions tho?

Do you have a concussion by typing "tho" ? JK

I played football, basketball and baseball in HS and in to my college years. This was back in the late 80's early 90s. Back then, coaches would just say "you just got your bell rung" , get back out there. I had 11 confirmed concussions back then, often loosing conscious and needing smelling salt to "revive".

My kid has already been diagnosed with 5. None from football.

I will say that our fancy private has the new tech in their helmets to know the amount of hits they get to the head and the intensity.

I hope your spouse knows how to recognize early signs of CTE.

I don’t care why someone gets 11 confirmed concussions…but no way this doesn’t impact you at some point in your life.

[Anonymous]

We had one big kid - 6'7" go to Stanford but he was a pretty good player and over 4.0 GPA. Sadly my kids are all over 6'5" and athletic and over 4.0 GPA but dropped HS sports early to pursue other interests - you can only lead a horse to water... The ones that are in college now had a rough time getting in as no hook white males despite stellar academics and ECs. If they had kept up sports it would have been a different story, esp given their sizes. Ironic but that is life for you. They are all doing well though and I am happy that they are incredibly fit without any grinding to their bodies from harsh sports. I think in the long run its a a good trade looking at my extreme-athlete DH knees. But I have friends with kids in D1 sports and they love it, so I get that too. Its a unique and special experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No one here has given a reason why recruited athletes should be RECRUITED rather than treated like other extracurriculars for admission to an academically challenging institution.

Money.

Obviously at the big D1 football schools like Alabama and Michigan. But even Vanderbilt is making a billion over ten years as part of the SEC. I'd imagine Notre Dame, Stanford, Northwestern, and Duke are all finding football very profitable as well. Even if they have losing teams, the tv contracts and shared revenue arrangements in the big conferences are significant revenue generators. And Notre Dame is Notre Dame.

Why it might matter at Yale or Amherst is a mystery they'll have to explain themselves. I'd guess alumni donations. And fostering a sense of community since a lot of alumni do care about football.

Every sport besides men's football and men's basketball costs the school lots of money

[Anonymous]

Concussin risk.