[Mick]

I’m guessing that this is driven by lawmakers alums of OSU and WSU, who know that they are dead in the water without there bigger brothers. Oregon and Washington aren’t going to be taken anywhere with OSU and WSU, who might have tradition, but are media deadweight.

I'm guessing the same is not true for Arizona, Arizona State and...Northern Arizona.

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On a ESPN sports talk show some guy said Big 10 is focused on getting Notre Dame to join the conference and won't look too closely at any other schools until that possibility is exhausted one way or the other.

Partnering Stanford and Notre Dame as Big 10 entrants might be interesting...

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I don't know where you all have been that you think Stanford hasn't prostituted itself on academic standards. Without naming names, we have athletes who are barely functional across multiple sports that I know and/or have first-hand experience with: football, women's soccer, women's softball. I mean droolingly stupid, and totally indifferent to academics. I'm talking current and/or very recent too. I'd actually like to go non-scholarship D1 (like an Ivy) or D3. The athlete vs non-athlete divide at Stanford in an era of 4-5% admission rates is a bigger gulf (the Grand Canyon!) than it has ever been. 

I admit that I'm a bit two-faced on this because I root hard for Stanford football and am a men's basketball season ticketholder. I basically think of them as a pro sports franchise, because there's nothing academic about those teams (with some exceptions of course) as much as we like to pretend otherwise. And don't give me this "our football players are smarter than Alabama's" cr@p. That may or may not be true, but it's beside the point.

In the late 1990s, the Bootleg ran a comparison of SAT scores across universities and their football teams.  If anyone wants to dig it out, the Stanford team had the highest average SAT by a considerable margin.  Alabama was literally hundreds of points below.  More recently, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a comparison of football team SATs amongst public schools, and let's just say that Cal / Mich were considerably ahead of 'bama.

That said, Stanford does have dramatically reduced SAT standards for athletes, though still considerably higher than the admissions standards of virtually all other schools. When my son went to Princeton, the average SAT of his incoming frosh teammates was 400 points higher than that of their club teammate who attended Stanford (1880 vs. 2280).  But then, the Stanford player was an All-American, and no one on Princeton's team was close to that.  It's a tradeoff.

[Mick]

I’m guessing that this is driven by lawmakers alums of OSU and WSU, who know that they are dead in the water without there bigger brothers. Oregon and Washington aren’t going to be taken anywhere with OSU and WSU, who might have tradition, but are media deadweight.

I'm guessing the same is not true for Arizona, Arizona State and...Northern Arizona.

---

On a ESPN sports talk show some guy said Big 10 is focused on getting Notre Dame to join the conference and won't look too closely at any other schools until that possibility is exhausted one way or the other.

Partnering Stanford and Notre Dame as Big 10 entrants might be interesting...

---

I don't know where you all have been that you think Stanford hasn't prostituted itself on academic standards. Without naming names, we have athletes who are barely functional across multiple sports that I know and/or have first-hand experience with: football, women's soccer, women's softball. I mean droolingly stupid, and totally indifferent to academics. I'm talking current and/or very recent too. I'd actually like to go non-scholarship D1 (like an Ivy) or D3. The athlete vs non-athlete divide at Stanford in an era of 4-5% admission rates is a bigger gulf (the Grand Canyon!) than it has ever been. 

I admit that I'm a bit two-faced on this because I root hard for Stanford football and am a men's basketball season ticketholder. I basically think of them as a pro sports franchise, because there's nothing academic about those teams (with some exceptions of course) as much as we like to pretend otherwise. And don't give me this "our football players are smarter than Alabama's" cr@p. That may or may not be true, but it's beside the point.

In the late 1990s, the Bootleg ran a comparison of SAT scores across universities and their football teams.  If anyone wants to dig it out, the Stanford team had the highest average SAT by a considerable margin.  Alabama was literally hundreds of points below.  More recently, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a comparison of football team SATs amongst public schools, and let's just say that Cal / Mich were considerably ahead of 'bama.

That said, Stanford does have dramatically reduced SAT standards for athletes, though still considerably higher than the admissions standards of virtually all other schools. When my son went to Princeton, the average SAT of his incoming frosh teammates was 400 points higher than that of their club teammate who attended Stanford (1880 vs. 2280).  But then, the Stanford player was an All-American, and no one on Princeton's team was close to that.  It's a tradeoff.