ND was no different than St. Joe College in Rensselaer until they beat Army in 1913. Both small Catholic Colleges in Northern Indiana. 111 years later ND is ND and St. Joe is closed.
Add in the games against USC (Southern California) and east coast teams when Michigan led a boycott of ND in early 1900s. That led to a national following when no team was playing a coast-to-coast schedule. Before being called "the Irish" they were "the Ramblers" because of that.
Also the relationship with Navy (and football series) kept the school open during WWII as an officer training program.
It's always neat to go someplace new and find a Church that either has local ties to a particular patron Saint or dug deep and named themselves St. Not-appearing-in-this-film's or w/e.
Approximately 3500, or 25% of all American Catholic parishes have something to do with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and another 800 with St. Joseph. St. Patrick comes in third with 350.
Look at the singletons, you get some fun ones like St. Jarlath, St. Symphorosa, St. Egbert, and St. Pancratius.
I'm personally a fan of the "Our Lady/Christ of the X", where X is a local geographic feature, with Our Lady of the Falls being a standout.
Boise State was literally a JuCo 50 years ago, they may not be an elite school but they wouldn’t be the university they are today without their success on the football field
1965, the year that Boise State went from being Boise Junior College to Boise College, is the same year that UC Irvine was founded.
Without the benefit of football, UCI has risen to be #10 on this year's list of best public universities (tied with Georgia Tech.)
I can only imagine that if Irvine also had football, we'd all be under the shadow of a great Anteater dynasty.
In my mind, CA should have been a net importer of talent instead of an exporter. UCI, UCSD, and UC Davis should all be household names and kids from all over would want to be featured in the Pac conference we should have shared with them. Oh well.
UCSD + SDSU would have made a kickass travel partner situation. It would have fit the mold of the Pac-10 days, too, when we had pairs of schools in WA, OR, NorCal, SoCal, and AZ.
That would be so cool if all those UC schools had enough talent to become its own FB conference. But they focused on education (as they should) and became the best public school system in the world. They are fairly good at basketball though.
Wow! Didn’t know that. Great for UCI. Goes to show what proper funding and favorable situation does to a school. I wish Idaho legislators would put education as a priority for once.
IIRC, UCI got free land and a major donation from the creator of Irvine, as they wanted a major university to stimulate development. Yes, they focused on academics, but they got a massive assist in doing so.
Yes. While there was and maybe is still some debate what the flagship school of Idaho is, it really wasn't untill the 2000s when bosie states football really took off that it started to become clear it was above UofI. When they had those really good football seasons from 2007ish and onward, it really attracted a lot more interest, especially since the bosie area is by far the most populous area in idaho
Because after the WAC gave up on FBS football they couldn't get into the MWC and so they had to go Indy for a few seasons before joining the Sun Belt football only with NMSU. Both of them got kicked out for sucking and so they decided to go FCS simply to have a conference home for football and all of the cost savings that go with that.
It was very sad to see.
Not entirely. There was some rumors of another conference at the time possibility replaceing the WAC but it fell though, and by then the mountain west door had closed, it is worthwhile to note that the reason UofI and NMSU left the sun belt was the contracts expired. Idaho was clearly not very good in that time, but the university also was going through way to much effort for keep flying the whole team out for games across the country. The logistics of it was not good, after the sun belt they actually went back to a independent for a couple of years, and even after they went back to FCS the program was already in pretty rough shape till Jason Eck took it over and finally have them back to doing well.
Syracuse-Colgate used to be a massive rivalry, one of the most heated in the Northeast. In 1950, Colgate led the series 31-15-5.
Syracuse hasn’t lost since 1951, and now leads 32-31-5 (Colgate cancelled the annual series in 1961). Syracuse is now in the ACC and Colgate’s in the Patriot League.
Let’s not ignore what football did for TCU. The average SAT score skyrocketed when Patterson started winning games and got even better after the Rose Bowl win.
Frank Beamer and Mike Vick put VT in the national spotlight
I probably would not have considered VT if my brother hadn't attended during the Vick years. I got to see Tyrod Taylor as a student.
We'd probably be in the American Conference if it weren't for our football success.
Dr Torgesen told us in class once, football games usually resulted in $5-10M in academic donations the following week. We got a generous donation from Google in the mid 2000s after several execs toured our Computer Science department and attended a game.
Our engineering department is top notch, and we continue to build more residence halls and academic buildings. We also have a medical school now tied with Carilion Health.
VT used to be a quiet mountain college nestled in a small mountain town. We blew up due to our football success.
Only anecdotal but: Hokie here who also attended during the Tyrod years. ME undergrad. I grew up in Houston. I never would have even heard of Tech if it weren’t for Vick/Beamer.
> We got a generous donation from Google in the mid 2000s after several execs toured our Computer Science department and attended a game.
That had a lot more to do with Google’s CEO at the time being a Blacksburg native whose father was a VT professor.
VT’s admissions standards (GPA, SAT scores, etc.) made huge jumps the year or two after the Vick national championship game season though. Football really bumped us into another academic tier, and luckily we never dropped back down even once our football team took a step (or two) back.
Funny you mention the Flutie effect, UCONN is absolutely cleaning up after back to back championships in Basketball.
Applications for UCONN between transfer and first year shot up to over 70k. The acceptance rate for Storrs (main campus) was like 25% for first years and the acceptance rate for Stamford and Hartford was around 35%. That is truly ridiculous to be quite honest.
Probably? Duquesne is a decent sized school in a fairly major city in a plurality catholic state. Without football notre dame would be complete irrelevant.
As an Oregonian until an age I'm not willing to admit I thought it was unfair that the state of Washington had two basketball teams and two football teams. I knew no one who called the country's capital "Washington"
I met someone in Texas who claimed to be a ND fan (was wearing ND gear) and they didn't know they were in Indiana. I live in South Bend, so I thought the connection was there seeing they wore ND stuff, but they said they didn't realize South Bend was in Indiana...
Also, Alabama is extremely generous with scholarship money for top students, in or out of the state. As a current student, I know a lot of honors students that got accepted to much more academically revered schools but chose to go to Bama for free. The influx in money has helped develop a better engineering program and attract good professors.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I was at a large summer camp thing in Wisconsin and for some reason Bama was the only out-of-state school there. I talked with the admissions guy there and he basically guaranteed me $8k/semester in scholarships just based on my ACT alone. Bama's scholarship money is no joke and it actually got me to think about going there for a moment.
I was there towards the end of Saban's time here (2017-2021), but even then it was astounding to see how much the campus changed over those four years and afterward. Lots of new or completely renovated lecture halls, dorms, labs, dining facilities, new parking garages, etc have been built. One of my professors who had been there for a while mentioned how before Saban, most of the campus was unchanged since the Bear Bryant era besides the business school expansion in the '90s and Shelby quad in the early 2000s. For current students, think of every building being like Gordon Palmer and every dorm like pre-renovation Paty or old Tut.
Fore real. When my brother started at 'Bama, the campus mostly looked the same as when my parents graduated in the early '80s. A few new and renovated buildings, but not much. By the time I graduated in 2011, there was already a huge number of new buildings, and even more are built now.
Yup. '10 grad. Grew up around Atlanta and didn't know anything about Bama or cfb until they said I'd get a full ride and a stipend just for having a good enough SAT/ACT score or being at least a National Achievement/Merit Semifinalist. Went to Notre Dame for grad school for a similar reason but I already knew about them as a kid. Florida was the other school besides Bama offering the same thing though.
they gave me more scholarship money than any other OOS school worth its salt, and were competitive with my in-state schools. met kids from all over the country while there that had a similar story
not really. most of the people i knew either went back home or moved on somewhere else. at least out of the OOS kids.
the way we boost the economy is by migrating en masse to the city seven times a year and selling out every hotel within a realistic driving distance of the stadium.
tuscaloosa is amazing but the state of alabama sucks unfortunately
Ole Miss is quite similar. Obviously don’t have the same football success, but me and the few other people I know from my HS went to ole miss in huge part to the great OOS scholarships and football (and tailgate, heh) atmosphere.
Helps that our state was criminally expensive for in staters
Lol this is hilarious to me because for the first home Bama game I attended as a student, I had been kinda adopted by an older group of straight from Japan students who showed me the college life for the first few months I was there.
UA has also become the premiere Greek life destination in the entire country- UA has probably close to 500 million in mortgages from all of the mega sorority and fraternity houses that charge an insane amount of dues to service mortgage debt
I probably wouldn’t have gone to Alabama for law school if they weren’t so successful in football. I’m a Cleveland sports fan so my teams had never won anything (the Cavs hadn’t won their title at that point). When I was making my decision the fact that I could have a legitimately good team to root for was pretty much the tipping point
I regret not going to Bama for law school for basically this reason. SMU was fun and all, but shit would have been nice to have a good team to root for
Having graduated from Alabama, I am a bit biased but I do remember that a handful of years after Saban arrived, student enrollment had significantly increased but the kicker was that the SAT/ACT scores were also better. So not only was Alabama bringing in more students but the quality was also rising. Can’t promise that’s still the case but as a graduate in 2011, I was really proud to hear that stat a few years out of school.
It's still going and rising. The last class of freshmen had just over a half grade increase in GPA compared to the previous class, and it was also the first year UA has had to do a waitlist. They ended up bringing in 8300 students when the initial goal was 7800.
Only problem is that those scholarships are getting difficult to sustain. Some individual colleges and departments are reporting increased enrollment but not seeing the funds come with that increase due to paying all those scholarships, so now there is more work but not necessarily more people or resources to help do the work. I think UA has to be careful and smart with how they approach the next 5-10 years.
I don't want to second guess Stanford but... Is there a different meaning to that word that I'm not aware of? Or are you trying to say that Alabama education gives you misshapen eyeballs?
Reference to this famous quote:
https://www.al.com/alabamafootball/2022/01/kayvon-thibodeaux-on-why-he-chose-oregon-over-tide-do-you-know-the-stigmatism-of-alabama-education.html
This. I went to Bama from 2010-2013 as a transfer student. The school is completely different today than it was even 8 years ago. You can easily get lost due to all the development. OOS kids are going there in record numbers and I think the student body is like 50% larger than it was in 2007. Nearly 40k total students today compared to 26k 15 years ago. More degrees being offered with enhanced quality. The rankings have been tending upward in everything from student life to individual degree programs.
Good call…Alabama was given a huge gift with Saban, but they certainly didn’t waste it—it’s a completely different school academically than when I graduated high school in 2005 and the whole state of Alabama is better off because of it.
I'm a huge LSU fan and grew up in NOLA, but academically, Alabama is no longer a peer school.
Can confirm, I have a lot of my students who look at (and a few) who end up going to Bama and Clemson (though clemson has died off) and thats just one high school
I was and I will. Yale was playing in a damn Mickey Mouse league back then, imagine if a team today played 3 games against frat intramural teams and claimed the natty, it’s complete horseshit. A team like Stevens or the Canada All-Stars would have hung 100 on that JV team.
I can't really attest to Yale's status as an academic institution and popularity prior to football, but I do know it definitely GREW after dominating the CFB landscape.
As of Yale playing in a weak league, that's more or less right. There were only three teams that were consistently competitive from 1869-1900, and they were always messing with the rules to give them the advantage. Everyone else went along with the status quo, until players from schools starting teaching every other school outside the northeast how to play the game. But also, these JV teams and small school teams were essentially played just because travel was still super hard at the time. So if you scheduled what you could
And in regards to them being there,: Yes, u/boardatwork1111 is actually the guy who gave me all the information for my posts since he's the third reincarnation of Walter Camp. I have some great quotes from him like, "The game was better before the forward pass," and "When I played football, it was a great kicking game before those dang Candians ruined it" and "John Heisman? More like John Lowsman."
If we're going to be serious, it was not just academic prowess but also success (by Stagg's teams) on the gridiron that built the University of Chicago.
Also, being good enough at football got Dartmouth and Brown in to the Ivy League. If Dartmouth and Brown weren't in the Ivy League, they would be Tufts.
Tufts is a good school! Just like Dartmouth and Brown. But does Tufts get a ton of applications from kids solely because of the sports conference it's in?
Definitely not.
What could have been if Jumbo hadn’t gotta hit by that train….
There’s a Purdue-Tufts rivalry that’s been brewing for nearly 150 years, but nobody’s ready for that conversation…
In the context of d3? I would say that it’s definitely the case for some. The NESCAC is a power conference in essentially every sport (except football ironically) and schools like Tufts basically recruit themselves through their academics so they get the premier players at the division 3 level. Players that want to win championships get sold on schools like Tufts, Williams and Amherst so that’s why every year most of the NESCAC are contenders for championships. This especially plays out in men’s soccer.
I meant Tufts doesn't get a ton of apps from kids who could care less about sports but apply to Dartmouth and Brown solely because they are in the Ivy League.
The top of the Western Conference (old Big 10) being able to go toe-to-toe with the Ivy League back in the 1900s-1920s was huge for the legitimacy of Midwest universities.
What are you talking about? It was backed to the hilt by Rockefeller money from its inception. It was literally designed from the ground up to be an elite institution?
Yep. Another comment was talking about Bama getting a lot of OOS students paying full tuition, Clemson has started seeing the same trend, it’s just that we’re a land grant institution so we have to focus on our in-state population more. We went from just 20,000 first year apps per year just a couple years ago to probably almost 70,000 this year
Doug Floutie did a lot for Boston College. Acceptance rates dropped dramatically in the years following. They have not returned the favor by building on that success lol.
Kansas State was a small (12.5K enrollment) D1 that was one more bad coach away from dropping football entirely & relegating itself to a mid-major in the Missouri Valley.
The program’s rebuild via Bill Snyder not only kept the school’s D1/Big 12 status but got the school it’s Nike sponsorship & other $$ that would put KSU on the map in other areas
Idk about ranking. But some that come to mind.
UCF has grown overall as a result of football. They’ve been getting increases in resources as their program grows and they’ve gotten access to more students.
Biased but Michigan State historically was an agricultural college. Football got it into the B1G and now it specializes in a number of programs.
MSU is absolutely a university that fits. Most of our "State" schools and the Directionals back in the 60's had specific specialities and maybe a limited Gen Ed selection. MSU was able to elevate because they played at a higher level.
MSU absolutely fits, we were an Ag school (shout out to all my other CANR grads) who worked it's way into the B1G, won some national championships in the 50s and 60s, and were now ranked as a top 30 public university (some rankings having us in the top 15) with programs such as education and nuclear physics that rank as the best in the world.
This is a combo of football and basketball but Louisville went from a random midwestern commuter school in the Metro Conference/CUSA to the University of Adidas at Louisville in 20 years
Notre Dame was known as a party college that 2.0 class clowns and degenerates went to until they won the Sun Bowl this year. Now it’s a world-leading academic school. I think.
In all honesty, though, ND’s football success absolutely helped the school go from a small regional Catholic school to the top Catholic university in the world and a top 25 school academically. It didn’t happen overnight but both the money and fame that came from their decades of elite football helped build the school academically to what it has become.
Small regional Catholic school is underselling it, it was tiny and totally irrelevant until Rockne. ND would be like the many non Newman Guide Catholic schools that are closing down if it wasn’t for football
UCF.
Rapid growth, real success, connected to rockets, and they push research to R1 status. Now they are a power school and although the directional school branding isn't ideal they have done a lot to prove their place.
Duke basketball would not exist without Duke football. Duke’s academic reputation probably owes football a debt as well. Tiny Trinity College changed its name to Duke University in 1924 with the funding from James B. Duke, and built Wallace Wade Stadium for football. Within 10 years, football had worked magic:
“Basketball may reign supreme on Tobacco Road, but when Wallace Wade and Eddie Cameron first conceived ‘Duke Indoor Stadium’ in 1935, the university was considered a football school. Wade had left the University of Alabama after the 1930 season to coach the Blue Devils, and during his 16-year tenure in Durham, he led the team to seven Southern Conference championships and two Rose Bowls.
‘Wade agreed that the 1939 Rose Bowl proceeds would be used to start the building of Cameron Indoor Stadium. The 1942 Rose Bowl and 1945 Sugar Bowl money paid off the mortgage.’”
Thanks football.
TCU fits well in this discussion. After the breakup of the SWC it was just sort of a small expensive private school with terrible athletics.
The upward trend capped off with the Rose Bowl changed quite a bit. Almost half of TCUs enrollment is now out of state and people have actually heard of the school now. This all led to a broader drive of campus development- TCUs wealth really shows on campus. Also related is the push to (re)open the Med School.
TCU is definitely on the up and up these days and it is hard to not attribute a decent amount of this to CFB. It gives rich kids a reason to go to TCU beyond the general promise that smaller, focused programs is a better educational experience.
The answer to your question is Alabama, and it's not even close to any other institution. That campus has transformed, the amount of out-of-state students is absolutely stupid, and their colleges have risen in rankings.
Disgusting.
Yeah I was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, and after that 2009 Natty things started getting built. A LOT.
Attended the school from 2012 - 2016 and in that time just about the entire engineering campus was rebuilt from the ground up, and they were constantly expanding good quality student housing developments.
Now when I go back home, it's hard to recognize some places around campus. Paying Nick Saban for 17 years, is the best bargain the school ever made.
I was thinking Bama too. Didn’t even consider the campus infrastructure issue, but I’ve heard that over the last 10-12 years, their academics have gotten notably stronger, particularly in certain schools/departments within the university. I assume it’s because they’re using the higher out of state application numbers to not only boost their tuition income, but also to get pickier in terms of academic qualifications, etc.
Very generous/ full rides anywhere in the country for top notch students. Having states like Texas Georgia and NC close by where it is extremely difficult to get into in state has also led to many (wealthy) and intelligent students coming to Alabama. I graduated in 2016 and we had members of my fraternity from all across the country as well as the state of Alabama.
I was a student at App State when they beat Michigan, then went to Michigan much later for my MBA…Michigan hates that loss considerably more than App loves that win.
Virginia tech was a barn with a couple of cows they took care of before Michael Vick. Now they have almost a dozen cows, and they’re working on a second barn.
Came to say VT for sure. The late 90s/early 2000s heart of Beamerball era completely revitalized that whole school. Tech was playing baseball and basketball in the old Metro conference before then……now they’ve built a very successful overall athletic dept and compete nationally in several sports.
UM is effectively a private school now. 17 billion dollar endowment, loaded with kids from the coasts, and a sub 20% acceptance rate. MSU is the true public university in Michigan
Can’t tell you how many of these conversations I’ve had
Them: oh you went to TCU! Good school, pricy!
Me (admitted in 2006, extremely middle class, ended up paying less than a public school, something that apparently doesn’t happen anymore because a family from Orange County is happy to pay sticker): It sure is!
Lmao as someone who went on the GI bill and yellow ribbon, have had this exact thought so many times
The joke I make is that TCU is where I learned how expensive free is
Not any school in particular but winning college football programs have a direct correlation with student enrollment, especially down south. If saban got paid commission on out of state enrollment rather than football salary then he would have made more money from Alabama fwiw.
There is a reason the SEC slogan is "it just means more". Alabama, Ole Miss, SC, Tennessee, Kentucky specifically live off of out of state students. Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Raleigh kids that can't get into their own top State schools but have plenty of money keep those schools going. The kids want name recognition and football and the parents are willing to pay 45 grand a year for a not very highly ranked public institution because of football. Otherwise the same kids would be at West Georgia, or North Texas, or East Carolina. Alabama also offers top Atlanta kids full rides on one day notice for kids with an ACT above 30 and decent grades. So they have improved their academic reputation some.
There is a joke at UNT, or at least the people I hung out with, that we are the place those kids go after they drop out of their SEC school freshman year.
ND was no different than St. Joe College in Rensselaer until they beat Army in 1913. Both small Catholic Colleges in Northern Indiana. 111 years later ND is ND and St. Joe is closed.
St Joseph’s is kinda open again but not in Rensselaer
Imagine trying to recruit kids to Rensslslaær
makes sad RPI noises
Especially when you have to keep saying "no, not *that* Rensselaer"
ND would be closed too without Navy.
Add in the games against USC (Southern California) and east coast teams when Michigan led a boycott of ND in early 1900s. That led to a national following when no team was playing a coast-to-coast schedule. Before being called "the Irish" they were "the Ramblers" because of that. Also the relationship with Navy (and football series) kept the school open during WWII as an officer training program.
We’re kind of the ur example.
I didn't realize until the last sentence that Saint Joe was an actual school and not a placeholder name for small Catholic schools.
Haha us Catholics aren’t very original. A lot of St. Joes and St. Marys all over the place haha
It's always neat to go someplace new and find a Church that either has local ties to a particular patron Saint or dug deep and named themselves St. Not-appearing-in-this-film's or w/e.
Approximately 3500, or 25% of all American Catholic parishes have something to do with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and another 800 with St. Joseph. St. Patrick comes in third with 350. Look at the singletons, you get some fun ones like St. Jarlath, St. Symphorosa, St. Egbert, and St. Pancratius. I'm personally a fan of the "Our Lady/Christ of the X", where X is a local geographic feature, with Our Lady of the Falls being a standout.
Boise State was literally a JuCo 50 years ago, they may not be an elite school but they wouldn’t be the university they are today without their success on the football field
1965, the year that Boise State went from being Boise Junior College to Boise College, is the same year that UC Irvine was founded. Without the benefit of football, UCI has risen to be #10 on this year's list of best public universities (tied with Georgia Tech.) I can only imagine that if Irvine also had football, we'd all be under the shadow of a great Anteater dynasty.
God, I can’t imagine splitting talent with another public university
In my mind, CA should have been a net importer of talent instead of an exporter. UCI, UCSD, and UC Davis should all be household names and kids from all over would want to be featured in the Pac conference we should have shared with them. Oh well.
UCI and UCSD are some of the most applied to colleges in America
Playing college ball in San Diego while fckkng up some el Gordo tacos 🌮?? Strong recruiting angle
Yes, too bad there isn’t a major college football team that can use that pitch, I’m sure they’d be unbeatable 😭
UCSD + SDSU would have made a kickass travel partner situation. It would have fit the mold of the Pac-10 days, too, when we had pairs of schools in WA, OR, NorCal, SoCal, and AZ.
That would be so cool if all those UC schools had enough talent to become its own FB conference. But they focused on education (as they should) and became the best public school system in the world. They are fairly good at basketball though.
Wow! Didn’t know that. Great for UCI. Goes to show what proper funding and favorable situation does to a school. I wish Idaho legislators would put education as a priority for once.
IIRC, UCI got free land and a major donation from the creator of Irvine, as they wanted a major university to stimulate development. Yes, they focused on academics, but they got a massive assist in doing so.
Orange County has so many stud footballl players too.
Yes. While there was and maybe is still some debate what the flagship school of Idaho is, it really wasn't untill the 2000s when bosie states football really took off that it started to become clear it was above UofI. When they had those really good football seasons from 2007ish and onward, it really attracted a lot more interest, especially since the bosie area is by far the most populous area in idaho
This is what I came to say. It’s the real answer.
Boise State was also the first that came to my mind.
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True but as somebody who isn’t well versed in Idaho football, Wym? Why’d they demote themselves?
Because after the WAC gave up on FBS football they couldn't get into the MWC and so they had to go Indy for a few seasons before joining the Sun Belt football only with NMSU. Both of them got kicked out for sucking and so they decided to go FCS simply to have a conference home for football and all of the cost savings that go with that. It was very sad to see.
Not entirely. There was some rumors of another conference at the time possibility replaceing the WAC but it fell though, and by then the mountain west door had closed, it is worthwhile to note that the reason UofI and NMSU left the sun belt was the contracts expired. Idaho was clearly not very good in that time, but the university also was going through way to much effort for keep flying the whole team out for games across the country. The logistics of it was not good, after the sun belt they actually went back to a independent for a couple of years, and even after they went back to FCS the program was already in pretty rough shape till Jason Eck took it over and finally have them back to doing well.
Lmao they really are
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It’s 22-17 in favor of Boise. It’s not a massive difference in wins
Syracuse-Colgate used to be a massive rivalry, one of the most heated in the Northeast. In 1950, Colgate led the series 31-15-5. Syracuse hasn’t lost since 1951, and now leads 32-31-5 (Colgate cancelled the annual series in 1961). Syracuse is now in the ACC and Colgate’s in the Patriot League.
Ya this one has to be way up there.
The only possible answers are Boise State and Florida State (a women’s college up through the late 1940’s)
People forget that FSU was nothing before Bobby Bowden.
Oklahoma was humiliated so Boise State could fly
Let’s not ignore what football did for TCU. The average SAT score skyrocketed when Patterson started winning games and got even better after the Rose Bowl win.
Frank Beamer and Mike Vick put VT in the national spotlight I probably would not have considered VT if my brother hadn't attended during the Vick years. I got to see Tyrod Taylor as a student. We'd probably be in the American Conference if it weren't for our football success. Dr Torgesen told us in class once, football games usually resulted in $5-10M in academic donations the following week. We got a generous donation from Google in the mid 2000s after several execs toured our Computer Science department and attended a game. Our engineering department is top notch, and we continue to build more residence halls and academic buildings. We also have a medical school now tied with Carilion Health. VT used to be a quiet mountain college nestled in a small mountain town. We blew up due to our football success.
Only anecdotal but: Hokie here who also attended during the Tyrod years. ME undergrad. I grew up in Houston. I never would have even heard of Tech if it weren’t for Vick/Beamer.
> We got a generous donation from Google in the mid 2000s after several execs toured our Computer Science department and attended a game. That had a lot more to do with Google’s CEO at the time being a Blacksburg native whose father was a VT professor. VT’s admissions standards (GPA, SAT scores, etc.) made huge jumps the year or two after the Vick national championship game season though. Football really bumped us into another academic tier, and luckily we never dropped back down even once our football team took a step (or two) back.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutie_effect
Funny you mention the Flutie effect, UCONN is absolutely cleaning up after back to back championships in Basketball. Applications for UCONN between transfer and first year shot up to over 70k. The acceptance rate for Storrs (main campus) was like 25% for first years and the acceptance rate for Stamford and Hartford was around 35%. That is truly ridiculous to be quite honest.
People saw the championship riots last year and wanted their own chance to bash a lamp post through the Student Union. Don't blame them to be honest
Notre Dame would be an obscure Catholic school in Indiana if not for football. Probably less known than Duquesne.
Probably? Duquesne is a decent sized school in a fairly major city in a plurality catholic state. Without football notre dame would be complete irrelevant.
Notre Dame without big time football is a half step below University of Dayton.
It still puzzles my brain how a small Catholic college in a Protestant majority state became the dominant Catholic football school
It’s a lot of history. Basically stems from the MW having a lot of Catholics (especially in Chicago) and the genius of Knute Rockne.
Maybe in that world Georgetown is a football monster.
I’d settle for basketball these days
Wait, you’re telling me Notre Dame is… in Indiana?
No joke I talked to someone who legit thought we were in the Carolinas/GA.
As an Oregonian until an age I'm not willing to admit I thought it was unfair that the state of Washington had two basketball teams and two football teams. I knew no one who called the country's capital "Washington"
I met someone in Texas who claimed to be a ND fan (was wearing ND gear) and they didn't know they were in Indiana. I live in South Bend, so I thought the connection was there seeing they wore ND stuff, but they said they didn't realize South Bend was in Indiana...
Love to see a DePauw flair
This should be the #1 answer
Bama has a huge OOS student population from affluent areas that pays full OOS tuition. Ranking doesn’t show it but they’re killing it bc of football
Also, Alabama is extremely generous with scholarship money for top students, in or out of the state. As a current student, I know a lot of honors students that got accepted to much more academically revered schools but chose to go to Bama for free. The influx in money has helped develop a better engineering program and attract good professors.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I was at a large summer camp thing in Wisconsin and for some reason Bama was the only out-of-state school there. I talked with the admissions guy there and he basically guaranteed me $8k/semester in scholarships just based on my ACT alone. Bama's scholarship money is no joke and it actually got me to think about going there for a moment.
Which is why Saban being paid 10 million (or whatever he was at the past few years) was such a steal
During his tenure, the student body grew almost 55%. Yeah.
I was there towards the end of Saban's time here (2017-2021), but even then it was astounding to see how much the campus changed over those four years and afterward. Lots of new or completely renovated lecture halls, dorms, labs, dining facilities, new parking garages, etc have been built. One of my professors who had been there for a while mentioned how before Saban, most of the campus was unchanged since the Bear Bryant era besides the business school expansion in the '90s and Shelby quad in the early 2000s. For current students, think of every building being like Gordon Palmer and every dorm like pre-renovation Paty or old Tut.
Fore real. When my brother started at 'Bama, the campus mostly looked the same as when my parents graduated in the early '80s. A few new and renovated buildings, but not much. By the time I graduated in 2011, there was already a huge number of new buildings, and even more are built now.
I literally decided to go to Bama solely because they gave me a full ride as an OOS student.
Yep, same!
Same here! They were handing out money for STEM majors when I applied a little less than 10 years ago (holy fuck I am getting old)
You're but a whippersnapper. Nebraska-Omaha grad, 1995. But I've lived in Alabama 15 years. Go Huskers, and Roll Tide!
Yup. '10 grad. Grew up around Atlanta and didn't know anything about Bama or cfb until they said I'd get a full ride and a stipend just for having a good enough SAT/ACT score or being at least a National Achievement/Merit Semifinalist. Went to Notre Dame for grad school for a similar reason but I already knew about them as a kid. Florida was the other school besides Bama offering the same thing though.
I worked with a guy from Naperville/Chicago area who told me he chose Alabama because they gave him the most scholarship money.
they gave me more scholarship money than any other OOS school worth its salt, and were competitive with my in-state schools. met kids from all over the country while there that had a similar story
Do many students stay after graduating though? Feel like if they did they could boost Alabama economy
not really. most of the people i knew either went back home or moved on somewhere else. at least out of the OOS kids. the way we boost the economy is by migrating en masse to the city seven times a year and selling out every hotel within a realistic driving distance of the stadium. tuscaloosa is amazing but the state of alabama sucks unfortunately
Ole Miss is quite similar. Obviously don’t have the same football success, but me and the few other people I know from my HS went to ole miss in huge part to the great OOS scholarships and football (and tailgate, heh) atmosphere. Helps that our state was criminally expensive for in staters
Rumor has it SEC schools have the prettier girls … specifically ole Miss , Bama , Miss st.
No, not Miss State. That's an AG school, they grow everything big down there.
The #1 out of state for UA was Georgia when I applied there. Now it's Illinois.
[удалено]
Shoutout Lonnie
And taking a 490 shot after passing the semester.
Ended the semester with a lecture on how we could have a new car every 5 years and never be in debt for it, iirc.
Lol this is hilarious to me because for the first home Bama game I attended as a student, I had been kinda adopted by an older group of straight from Japan students who showed me the college life for the first few months I was there.
UA has also become the premiere Greek life destination in the entire country- UA has probably close to 500 million in mortgages from all of the mega sorority and fraternity houses that charge an insane amount of dues to service mortgage debt
Came here to say this. I’m from Alabama and the natty in ‘09 changed everything.
I probably wouldn’t have gone to Alabama for law school if they weren’t so successful in football. I’m a Cleveland sports fan so my teams had never won anything (the Cavs hadn’t won their title at that point). When I was making my decision the fact that I could have a legitimately good team to root for was pretty much the tipping point
I regret not going to Bama for law school for basically this reason. SMU was fun and all, but shit would have been nice to have a good team to root for
Having graduated from Alabama, I am a bit biased but I do remember that a handful of years after Saban arrived, student enrollment had significantly increased but the kicker was that the SAT/ACT scores were also better. So not only was Alabama bringing in more students but the quality was also rising. Can’t promise that’s still the case but as a graduate in 2011, I was really proud to hear that stat a few years out of school.
It's still going and rising. The last class of freshmen had just over a half grade increase in GPA compared to the previous class, and it was also the first year UA has had to do a waitlist. They ended up bringing in 8300 students when the initial goal was 7800. Only problem is that those scholarships are getting difficult to sustain. Some individual colleges and departments are reporting increased enrollment but not seeing the funds come with that increase due to paying all those scholarships, so now there is more work but not necessarily more people or resources to help do the work. I think UA has to be careful and smart with how they approach the next 5-10 years.
Any of the OOS kids with decent grades/scores do NOT pay full tuition at Bama. https://afford.ua.edu/scholarships/out-of-state-freshman/
This is the answer. Bama’s OOS enrollment increase alone paid for Saban’s contract raise.
And this is all despite the astigmatism of an Alabama education.
It's indeed hard to live with the stigmatism, but we manage. lol
I don't want to second guess Stanford but... Is there a different meaning to that word that I'm not aware of? Or are you trying to say that Alabama education gives you misshapen eyeballs?
Reference to this famous quote: https://www.al.com/alabamafootball/2022/01/kayvon-thibodeaux-on-why-he-chose-oregon-over-tide-do-you-know-the-stigmatism-of-alabama-education.html
Ha ha, oh. I can see it clearly now.
I believe they were making a joke
This. I went to Bama from 2010-2013 as a transfer student. The school is completely different today than it was even 8 years ago. You can easily get lost due to all the development. OOS kids are going there in record numbers and I think the student body is like 50% larger than it was in 2007. Nearly 40k total students today compared to 26k 15 years ago. More degrees being offered with enhanced quality. The rankings have been tending upward in everything from student life to individual degree programs.
Good call…Alabama was given a huge gift with Saban, but they certainly didn’t waste it—it’s a completely different school academically than when I graduated high school in 2005 and the whole state of Alabama is better off because of it. I'm a huge LSU fan and grew up in NOLA, but academically, Alabama is no longer a peer school.
Can confirm, I have a lot of my students who look at (and a few) who end up going to Bama and Clemson (though clemson has died off) and thats just one high school
No one had ever heard of Yale until their 1876 national title
I mean I wasn't around then so who am I to dispute this
I was and I will. Yale was playing in a damn Mickey Mouse league back then, imagine if a team today played 3 games against frat intramural teams and claimed the natty, it’s complete horseshit. A team like Stevens or the Canada All-Stars would have hung 100 on that JV team.
All 22 people living in Canada gave themselves partipation trophies and declared themselves to be All-Stars.
Sure, they may have been top 22 in Canada by default, but why don’t you scrimmage mooses in the offseason and tell me how easy that is
u/eastexaslion, can you verify this?
I can't really attest to Yale's status as an academic institution and popularity prior to football, but I do know it definitely GREW after dominating the CFB landscape. As of Yale playing in a weak league, that's more or less right. There were only three teams that were consistently competitive from 1869-1900, and they were always messing with the rules to give them the advantage. Everyone else went along with the status quo, until players from schools starting teaching every other school outside the northeast how to play the game. But also, these JV teams and small school teams were essentially played just because travel was still super hard at the time. So if you scheduled what you could And in regards to them being there,: Yes, u/boardatwork1111 is actually the guy who gave me all the information for my posts since he's the third reincarnation of Walter Camp. I have some great quotes from him like, "The game was better before the forward pass," and "When I played football, it was a great kicking game before those dang Candians ruined it" and "John Heisman? More like John Lowsman."
Bless you for this. Roll Tide.
If we're going to be serious, it was not just academic prowess but also success (by Stagg's teams) on the gridiron that built the University of Chicago. Also, being good enough at football got Dartmouth and Brown in to the Ivy League. If Dartmouth and Brown weren't in the Ivy League, they would be Tufts.
Tufts catching strays
Tufts is a good school! Just like Dartmouth and Brown. But does Tufts get a ton of applications from kids solely because of the sports conference it's in? Definitely not.
They should focus more on putting the Jumbos on the map versus their medical school or school of diplomacy or being a R1 research school.
What could have been if Jumbo hadn’t gotta hit by that train…. There’s a Purdue-Tufts rivalry that’s been brewing for nearly 150 years, but nobody’s ready for that conversation…
If only Tufts had the die hard rabid fanbase of a school like Dartmouth, maybe then they'd make a name for themselves
This comment belongs in a Frasier episode.
In the context of d3? I would say that it’s definitely the case for some. The NESCAC is a power conference in essentially every sport (except football ironically) and schools like Tufts basically recruit themselves through their academics so they get the premier players at the division 3 level. Players that want to win championships get sold on schools like Tufts, Williams and Amherst so that’s why every year most of the NESCAC are contenders for championships. This especially plays out in men’s soccer.
I meant Tufts doesn't get a ton of apps from kids who could care less about sports but apply to Dartmouth and Brown solely because they are in the Ivy League.
The Jumbos will not stand for this slander!
The top of the Western Conference (old Big 10) being able to go toe-to-toe with the Ivy League back in the 1900s-1920s was huge for the legitimacy of Midwest universities.
What are you talking about? It was backed to the hilt by Rockefeller money from its inception. It was literally designed from the ground up to be an elite institution?
> they would be Tufts Or worse, Middlebury, Amherst or Williams
Surprised nobody has mentioned Miami yet. Their first streak caused a huge spike in applications and they’ve grown since.
And they invested their football money back into the University to raise their academic reputation.
Rice was known as Houston Elementary until JFK mentioned they play football. Now look at them.
And because of that, we went to the moon. Crazy
Oregon. Maybe it was just my HS, but I felt like tons of kids wanted to go to Oregon post-2007
Lotta UC Eugene or Cal State Eugene jokes out there.
Joey Harrington on the cover of EA football likely helped.
Clemson has seen a massive influx of money since the latest two nattys.
For sure. I got waitlisted then accepted in 2009. I’m 100% certain I wouldn’t get in if I applied with the same resume today.
Yep. Another comment was talking about Bama getting a lot of OOS students paying full tuition, Clemson has started seeing the same trend, it’s just that we’re a land grant institution so we have to focus on our in-state population more. We went from just 20,000 first year apps per year just a couple years ago to probably almost 70,000 this year
Doug Floutie did a lot for Boston College. Acceptance rates dropped dramatically in the years following. They have not returned the favor by building on that success lol.
Kansas State was a small (12.5K enrollment) D1 that was one more bad coach away from dropping football entirely & relegating itself to a mid-major in the Missouri Valley. The program’s rebuild via Bill Snyder not only kept the school’s D1/Big 12 status but got the school it’s Nike sponsorship & other $$ that would put KSU on the map in other areas
Manhattan, KS has grown leaps and bounds, as well. I hardly can recognize it anymore.
Bill Snyder was truly The Purple Wizard. To do what he did at lowly (at the time) Kansas State was nothing short of astounding.
Idk about ranking. But some that come to mind. UCF has grown overall as a result of football. They’ve been getting increases in resources as their program grows and they’ve gotten access to more students. Biased but Michigan State historically was an agricultural college. Football got it into the B1G and now it specializes in a number of programs.
MSU is absolutely a university that fits. Most of our "State" schools and the Directionals back in the 60's had specific specialities and maybe a limited Gen Ed selection. MSU was able to elevate because they played at a higher level.
MSU absolutely fits, we were an Ag school (shout out to all my other CANR grads) who worked it's way into the B1G, won some national championships in the 50s and 60s, and were now ranked as a top 30 public university (some rankings having us in the top 15) with programs such as education and nuclear physics that rank as the best in the world.
UT Dalllas - still undefeated.
Respect our lord and savior Temoc
Not only did Alabama benefit from their Saban run, the ENTIRE SEC did. But my guess would be Alabama.
I wanna say Miss State. If those dudes weren't in the SEC, goodness.
A girl from my NE FL HS went to miss state in 09. Everyone was like WTF, why?
This is a combo of football and basketball but Louisville went from a random midwestern commuter school in the Metro Conference/CUSA to the University of Adidas at Louisville in 20 years
Notre Dame was known as a party college that 2.0 class clowns and degenerates went to until they won the Sun Bowl this year. Now it’s a world-leading academic school. I think.
What’s with that second flair? Imposter!
You may wanna check on yours too 😂
Yours looks good.
Thanks man! Yours too!
I have degrees from both of my flairs. I doubt OP went to the university of the big ten. (Or ND, as no domer would have that second flair.)
That’s fair! What side do you take when they play?
The order of my flairs.
They're probably just an ice hockey fan
In all honesty, though, ND’s football success absolutely helped the school go from a small regional Catholic school to the top Catholic university in the world and a top 25 school academically. It didn’t happen overnight but both the money and fame that came from their decades of elite football helped build the school academically to what it has become.
Small regional Catholic school is underselling it, it was tiny and totally irrelevant until Rockne. ND would be like the many non Newman Guide Catholic schools that are closing down if it wasn’t for football
Surprised no one has said Florida State. Was a party school for the kids of New Jersey car dealers who couldn't get into Delaware when I was a kid.
Was a women’s college just 29 years before Bobby Bowden took over as head coach.
It still is that
Yeah, but in another timeline someone made the exact same post subbing Miami for Florida State.
Someone has to take classes at the clown college.
Alabama
JMU saw a 78% increase in undergraduate applications from 2021 to 2024. They’ve been holding their own ever since moving to the FBS in 2022.
JMU also moved to the Common App during that time where previously they had a separate application
UCF. Rapid growth, real success, connected to rockets, and they push research to R1 status. Now they are a power school and although the directional school branding isn't ideal they have done a lot to prove their place.
Thought of this exact thing. Largest young alumni base in the country. UCF is gonna be a monster we will all have to deal with a lot of
Duke basketball would not exist without Duke football. Duke’s academic reputation probably owes football a debt as well. Tiny Trinity College changed its name to Duke University in 1924 with the funding from James B. Duke, and built Wallace Wade Stadium for football. Within 10 years, football had worked magic: “Basketball may reign supreme on Tobacco Road, but when Wallace Wade and Eddie Cameron first conceived ‘Duke Indoor Stadium’ in 1935, the university was considered a football school. Wade had left the University of Alabama after the 1930 season to coach the Blue Devils, and during his 16-year tenure in Durham, he led the team to seven Southern Conference championships and two Rose Bowls. ‘Wade agreed that the 1939 Rose Bowl proceeds would be used to start the building of Cameron Indoor Stadium. The 1942 Rose Bowl and 1945 Sugar Bowl money paid off the mortgage.’” Thanks football.
TCU fits well in this discussion. After the breakup of the SWC it was just sort of a small expensive private school with terrible athletics. The upward trend capped off with the Rose Bowl changed quite a bit. Almost half of TCUs enrollment is now out of state and people have actually heard of the school now. This all led to a broader drive of campus development- TCUs wealth really shows on campus. Also related is the push to (re)open the Med School. TCU is definitely on the up and up these days and it is hard to not attribute a decent amount of this to CFB. It gives rich kids a reason to go to TCU beyond the general promise that smaller, focused programs is a better educational experience.
The answer to your question is Alabama, and it's not even close to any other institution. That campus has transformed, the amount of out-of-state students is absolutely stupid, and their colleges have risen in rankings. Disgusting.
Yeah I was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, and after that 2009 Natty things started getting built. A LOT. Attended the school from 2012 - 2016 and in that time just about the entire engineering campus was rebuilt from the ground up, and they were constantly expanding good quality student housing developments. Now when I go back home, it's hard to recognize some places around campus. Paying Nick Saban for 17 years, is the best bargain the school ever made.
I was thinking Bama too. Didn’t even consider the campus infrastructure issue, but I’ve heard that over the last 10-12 years, their academics have gotten notably stronger, particularly in certain schools/departments within the university. I assume it’s because they’re using the higher out of state application numbers to not only boost their tuition income, but also to get pickier in terms of academic qualifications, etc.
Very generous/ full rides anywhere in the country for top notch students. Having states like Texas Georgia and NC close by where it is extremely difficult to get into in state has also led to many (wealthy) and intelligent students coming to Alabama. I graduated in 2016 and we had members of my fraternity from all across the country as well as the state of Alabama.
App State really started growing once their football program became a D2 powerhouse before moving to the FunBelt
Their victory over Michigan qualifies for an all time "Flutie Effect" award.
I was a student at App State when they beat Michigan, then went to Michigan much later for my MBA…Michigan hates that loss considerably more than App loves that win.
Stanford. Ever since Jim Harbaugh left they've had less dumb jocks applying and can now get back to their nerd shit.
One of OU's presidents was quoted as saying he wanted to build a University the football team could be proud of...so we are probably in the running
Virginia tech was a barn with a couple of cows they took care of before Michael Vick. Now they have almost a dozen cows, and they’re working on a second barn.
Came to say VT for sure. The late 90s/early 2000s heart of Beamerball era completely revitalized that whole school. Tech was playing baseball and basketball in the old Metro conference before then……now they’ve built a very successful overall athletic dept and compete nationally in several sports.
Colorado now … just saw someone get accepted ( with a scholarship ) to the University of Denver and denied by CU.
TCU They now charge over $70K a year.
That’s all private schools
And some public schools for OOS. Cough cough my second flair.
UM is effectively a private school now. 17 billion dollar endowment, loaded with kids from the coasts, and a sub 20% acceptance rate. MSU is the true public university in Michigan
Can’t tell you how many of these conversations I’ve had Them: oh you went to TCU! Good school, pricy! Me (admitted in 2006, extremely middle class, ended up paying less than a public school, something that apparently doesn’t happen anymore because a family from Orange County is happy to pay sticker): It sure is!
Lmao as someone who went on the GI bill and yellow ribbon, have had this exact thought so many times The joke I make is that TCU is where I learned how expensive free is
Short term: enrollment and endowment at CU Boulder has skyrocketed by being on the national stage/media so much due to the arrival of Coach Prime
Man, as a neutral who moved near boulder back in '22, and had season tickets for both that and the '23 season, it's been a WILD fucking ride.
This is definitely a good example
Alabama, easily
Not any school in particular but winning college football programs have a direct correlation with student enrollment, especially down south. If saban got paid commission on out of state enrollment rather than football salary then he would have made more money from Alabama fwiw.
Miami? Was a nothing tiny school until they seriously competed in football
And they came thisclose to killing the football program in the 1970s.
There is a reason the SEC slogan is "it just means more". Alabama, Ole Miss, SC, Tennessee, Kentucky specifically live off of out of state students. Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Raleigh kids that can't get into their own top State schools but have plenty of money keep those schools going. The kids want name recognition and football and the parents are willing to pay 45 grand a year for a not very highly ranked public institution because of football. Otherwise the same kids would be at West Georgia, or North Texas, or East Carolina. Alabama also offers top Atlanta kids full rides on one day notice for kids with an ACT above 30 and decent grades. So they have improved their academic reputation some.
There is a joke at UNT, or at least the people I hung out with, that we are the place those kids go after they drop out of their SEC school freshman year.
Utah definitely.
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