Patriot League: Changing the AI?

Today at Noon, the Patriot League office issued the following statement in regards to "revisions to academic policies":

Center Valley, Pa. - The Patriot League Council of Presidents endorsed a set of recommendations for revising the League's academic index with the objective of providing more consistency in the application of the index and internal equity between member institutions. The actions will also enhance admissions and athletic competitiveness of programs externally while maintaining the integrity of the League's founding principles.

...
The Presidents' actions were based on a series of recommendations with respect to the calculation and application of the academic index. Those principles will now be reviewed for fine-tuning and implementation by an advisory group made up of athletic directors, admissions representatives and the League's policy committee. The Presidents will review and finalize the comprehensive plan during their June meeting for admissions of student-athletes that will enter Patriot League institutions in the Fall of 2009.

Details at this point are sketchy. I plan to find out more information about this and post my findings in the College Sporting News. About the only thing that is clear at this point is that it will be in effect by the 2009 season, it will involve the academic index (or AI for short) calculation across all sports (not just football), and that this is a broad-based announcement: the final details haven't been hammered out yet, those will be when the League's advisory group meets to work on this. Also, whether it involves aid policies for football or anything else in regards to aid is not mentioned anywhere in the release.

Last year I wrote a piece for College Sporting News regarding the AI, which you can look at here. In that piece, I put the following suggestion:

Maybe putting some subjective criteria into the AI (like a portion of the AI score coming from admissions and athletics interviews, for example) might help identify other athletes who could thrive at Patriot League institutions. Some critics might call that dumbing down academic standards, but I think of it as reaching outside the strict lines of the AI to find more exceptional students that could be slipping through the cracks. Not everything can be boiled down to a test score – that’s why colleges have admissions offices. If a regular student can be helped in admissions with a good interview, why can’t an athlete’s AI?

It looks like the members of the advisory group have a real chance to be leaders instead of followers here when it comes to the calculations and what to consider. Here's hoping that they will take the big steps to get more of those students that are good enough to succeed at Patriot League schools but currently are priced out due to rigid AI calculations.

More, hopefully, to come later this week on this announcement.

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

Lehigh Football Nation

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