The true last amateurs

 

Four years ago, longtime college basketball writer John Feinstein published a book called The Last Amateurs which dealt with the Patriot League and its lack of athletic scholarships, specifically in basketball. As of this week, though, that title no longer applies.

Yesterday, Lafayette College became the last Patriot League school to offer athletic scholarships. In a press release yesterday, Lafayette said it would give three scholarships each to men's and women's basketball starting with this fall's incoming class, and then give scholarships in men's soccer and women's field hockey a year later. This will happen without cutting other sports, which is good for Lafayette's compliance with Title IX regulations and of course for its program generally. Now that the entire Patriot League has athletic scholarships, the Ivy League is officially the only conference in Division I that offers no athletic merit-based aid.

The Patriot League began offering scholarships in 1998 when Holy Cross joined the Patriot from the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, because Holy Cross had previously been able to do so in the MAAC. When American University joined the Patriot League in 2001, it was allowed to continue spending the same amount of money on scholarships that it did in the Colonial Athletic Association, but had to spread that money out over a wider range of sports than it did in the CAA.

Since then, four more Patriot League schools -- Lehigh, Colgate, Bucknell and now Lafayette -- have added athletic scholarships as each has seen fit (the other two Patriot League schools, Army and Navy, offer free educations with a five-year service requirement). That has meant scholarships for wrestling, soccer, field hockey, and a range of other sports except for football, in which there are no scholarships.

By far, though, the biggest beneficiary of scholarships has been men's basketball. Not because of the financial commitment per se, but because Bucknell was able to put a team together that knocked off Kansas in last year's NCAA Tournament. I remember Bison coach Pat Flannery saying on CBS last year that his team would have not have been able to pull off that historic upset, the first ever Patriot League win in the tournament, without athletic scholarships.

So what does this all mean for Penn and the Ivy League, beyond the dubious designation of being the only conference without athletic scholarships? It means a lot. On a small scale, it means that Penn's games with Lafayette are going to get a lot more competitive. Don't expect the Leopards, coached by former Penn assistant Fran O'Hanlon, to be on the wrong end of a cheesesteaking anymore.

On a wider scale, it means that O'Hanlon will now have a big recruiting advantage against his former boss. Yes, Penn still has the Palestra and the Big 5, which are enormous assets when recruiting in the Philadelphia area. But after losing to Penn this past season, O'Hanlon said something that now becomes a lot more profound. Referring to Mark Zoller, Brian Grandieri and Ibrahim Jaaber, he said that Penn "got all the guys that we wanted ... We recruited them [and then] Dunph comes in after I recruited them all year."

That won't happen as much now, and if Flannery continues his sucess at Bucknell -- which opened a sparkling new arena, Sojka Pavilion, in 2003 -- Penn will be at an even bigger disadvantage. But the rest of the Ivy League will be hurt just as much as Penn. We have often heard about recruits, especially in men's basketball, that Penn and other Ivy schools have wanted but who have not been able to get the right kind of financial aid package and have thus gone to other schools. La Salle's Paul Johnson is a great example, and depending on who you listen to, Villanova's Will Sheridan and Chet Stachitas of Saint Joseph's could also have been Quakers if the setup was right.

Heck, I'm sitting here watching the Big Ten tournament on TV, and the play-by-play crew just said that Wisconsin center Kevin Gullickson "got some interest from Ivy League schools." He decided to go to Madison for other reasons, including that his dad also played for the Badgers, but if the playing field was more level, perhaps we would have seen him in the Ancient Eight.

Now I do not think that the Ivy League needs to have athletic scholarships specifically in order to compete better with scholarship conferences both on and off the floor. But Lafayette's decision is another sign of the fact that the Ivy League is at a serious competitive disadvantage right now. With the Academic Index and the many other complex recruiting restrictions, the chance of the Ivy League making a national name for itself in sports instead of just academia decreases by the year.

It doesn't have to be this way. And it doesn't have to harm the Ivy League's academic excellence either. It could be something as complex as reworking the financial aid rules, or something as simple as making sure the Penn-Princeton basketball game gets on national television every year. The Ivy League's brands are second to none in this country, and if athletes really wanted to come and play here I suspect there would be ways to get the finances worked out. Honestly, all of us who write for the Buzz could write long pieces about how to improve Ivy League sports. I think I've written enough for now.

Except to conclude by notifying the media that it would be nice if someone in the professional ranks wrote more about the real "last amateurs" of college sports.

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