Diversity

If you've ever wondered just how expensive, difficult, and tiring it is to recruit football players for an Ivy League school, check out this study from Mode Blog.

It looks at the college football teams with the most geographically diverse rosters. It should come as no surprise that five of the top 10 most diverse teams are Ivies. Columbia comes in at #9 overall.

High school players who have the academic credentials and athletic potential to play football in the Ivies are literally few and far between, emphasis on the "far."

But is it possible that we've taken the search a little too far? Several former coaches and players have privately told me over the years that they believe Columbia has spread its feelers too thin and should get back to focusing on the New England preps for 2-3 more recruits per year.

All of this has to be balanced just right. Columbia had its only success in recent memory in the 1990's when then-Head Coach Ray Tellier really put an emphasis on recruiting California. For whatever reason, the other Ivies had started to ignore the state and the Lions swooped in. By 1996, the last time CU had a winning record, MOST of the roster was from California.

But thet other Ivies soon swooped in and that advantage was lost by 1999 or so. Time ran out and Columbia did not adjust.

Meanwhile, Princeton has the #1 most diverse roster in the country and that renewed effort to spread out the recruiting feelers surely has paid dividends for a team that's basically gone from worst to first in three years.

The moral of the story is that recruiting for the Ivies is so tough that you might get better results from travelling more miles, or you might not. You might get a good bang for your travel buck, or you might not. It all depends.

However, I would say that if you're not winning it's time to try something else. So if Columbia remains a team with a very diverse roster and a very empty win column, we might want to try staying with one region more than another next time around.