(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

$5K a month in 1969? That’s like $50K now.

(07-31-2021 09:42 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

$5K a month in 1969? That’s like $50K now.

Yep. And his job was basically to stay in a house that would probably have rented for something like $5K/week back then. Plus he had a grocery allowance.

(07-31-2021 10:19 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 09:42 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

$5K a month in 1969? That’s like $50K now.

Yep. And his job was basically to stay in a house that would probably have rented for something like $5K/week back then. Plus he had a grocery allowance.

I remember at the end of the 63-64 school year, I spoke to one of the football players who told me he had a summer job lined up making $5/hr, watching some dials. I was insanely jealous. I ended up working that summer in a sawmill for $1.25/hr.

(07-31-2021 10:25 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 10:19 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 09:42 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

$5K a month in 1969? That’s like $50K now.

Yep. And his job was basically to stay in a house that would probably have rented for something like $5K/week back then. Plus he had a grocery allowance.

I remember at the end of the 63-64 school year, I spoke to one of the football players who told me he had a summer job lined up making $5/hr, watching some dials. I was insanely jealous. I ended up working that summer in a sawmill for $1.25/hr.

Well, we certainly engaged in a bit of that, but not like the Ivies.

When people say that Rice should have an Ivy-League-type athletic program, I think they fail to understand that the typical Yale or Princeton alum is far more passionate about beating Harvard than the typical Rice alum ever was about beating Texas.

The other thing about the Ivies is that they pretty much all compete in a much larger number of women's and Olympic sports than Rice does. And they are passionate about winning them, too. When I took my women's rugby team to the Sweet-16 tournament, each school was assigned a team space for between matches. The tempo of a sevens tournament is that you play a 20-30 minute game in a 30-minute time slot, then have 2 hours or so off, then another 30-minute game slot, then another 2 hours off, then another 30-minute game slot, so there was considerable time between matches. Spaces were assigned alphabetically, so we were between Princeton and Stanford. Several of my girls had never been outside Texas, and were pretty wide-eyed about the whole thing. One of them came up to me and asked, "Is that THE Princeton?" Yes, I replied, it was.

And I mentioned previously about the Princeton alumni pregame tent for the women's 15s finals in Tampa.

If Rice were to have a true Ivy-League athletic program, we would probably have to add at least 10 sports for men and 10-15 for women, and to take every one of them more seriously than we currently take football. That's kind of what Hambone has alluded to several times, that maybe a way to build the athletic program would be to focus on women's and Olympic sports, build a reputation there, and then transfer that to the money men's sports. Harry Fouke did that at UH, building around a golf program, so it can be done. And the advantages would be that those sports are not expensive, do not require a large number of athletes, and typically involve true student-athletes who would bring up the athletic program's SAT/ACT scores, GPAs, and academic progress rates.

A co-worker of mine in the early 80's told me that her boyfriend who was on the D Line with Ray Childress at eATMe said that Ray was getting 5k/month.

(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

Something about the current quality of the Ivy League football teams indicates they are, in fact, not doing it that way (or any way).

Seriously, are the Ivies paying students under the table or covering their tuition in illicit ways? What is the benefit to them? Is it worth it to increase their brand recognition? At least the admissions scandal made sense - the coaches were making extra money to use their preferred acceptance to get students into the schools.

(07-31-2021 01:12 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  Seriously, are the Ivies paying students under the table or covering their tuition in illicit ways?

There's nothing illicit about it. Since they don't give "athletic" scholarships, a bunch of NCAA rules don't apply. They still have fairly strict admissions standards, even with exceptions, and that limits their recruiting field. It kind of comes down to how badly they want to win. Some do, some don't.

But my larger point is really about how much more seriously they take women's and Olympic sports, and how much more effort they put into some of them, than Rice does.

(07-31-2021 01:12 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

Something about the current quality of the Ivy League football teams indicates they are, in fact, not doing it that way (or any way).

Seriously, are the Ivies paying students under the table or covering their tuition in illicit ways? What is the benefit to them? Is it worth it to increase their brand recognition? At least the admissions scandal made sense - the coaches were making extra money to use their preferred acceptance to get students into the schools.

it is of benefit to the coaches and ADs to win more games. For that you need better athletes, some of whom won't come without inducements. Lots of our players had offers from Ivies. We offered a full ride, I guess Princeton could not match.

(07-31-2021 01:12 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  Something about the current quality of the Ivy League football teams indicates they are, in fact, not doing it that way (or any way).

After the last "normal" season, both Dartmouth (9-1) and Yale (9-1) were ranked among the FCS top 25. There's never an accurate measure for the Ivies because they do not compete in the playoffs. But there's enough data to conclude that their best teams are on a par with the playoff teams (not including the handful on the level of North Dakota State, James Madison or Sam Houston State).

Having gone to Penn and seen some games since then, ivy football is awful

Fouke (Rice 1935) was good at picking coaches-Williams in golf I think was already teaching something else at UH, Yeoman (Aggie fish in 1945 before moving to West Point) and Guy Lewis in basketball (rice before WW2 and UH after the war as a player.)

Rice was passionate in football in the old days according to my mother. The students locked the gates to campus in 1949 after Rice beat UT to get a day off to celebrate.

(07-31-2021 10:53 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 10:25 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 10:19 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 09:42 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-31-2021 08:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  My first duty assignment after graduating from Rice and becoming and officer and gentleman by act of congress was communications officer school in Newport, RI. I ended up renting a house with 4 other single junior officers. One of them had gone to the University of North Carolina, and had a fraternity brother whose father was a Yale graduate and crude oil trader in New York City. In that business he had dealt a lot with the Rockefellers, and somewhere along the way he had bought a vacation house from one of them on Cape Cod. We would go out there on weekends. The caretaker was a guy who was a tight end on the Yale football team who was being paid something like $5K/month to live in the house and keep someone from stealing it. That's how they do it.

$5K a month in 1969? That’s like $50K now.

Yep. And his job was basically to stay in a house that would probably have rented for something like $5K/week back then. Plus he had a grocery allowance.

I remember at the end of the 63-64 school year, I spoke to one of the football players who told me he had a summer job lined up making $5/hr, watching some dials. I was insanely jealous. I ended up working that summer in a sawmill for $1.25/hr.

Well, we certainly engaged in a bit of that, but not like the Ivies.

When people say that Rice should have an Ivy-League-type athletic program, I think they fail to understand that the typical Yale or Princeton alum is far more passionate about beating Harvard than the typical Rice alum ever was about beating Texas.

The other thing about the Ivies is that they pretty much all compete in a much larger number of women's and Olympic sports than Rice does. And they are passionate about winning them, too. When I took my women's rugby team to the Sweet-16 tournament, each school was assigned a team space for between matches. The tempo of a sevens tournament is that you play a 20-30 minute game in a 30-minute time slot, then have 2 hours or so off, then another 30-minute game slot, then another 2 hours off, then another 30-minute game slot, so there was considerable time between matches. Spaces were assigned alphabetically, so we were between Princeton and Stanford. Several of my girls had never been outside Texas, and were pretty wide-eyed about the whole thing. One of them came up to me and asked, "Is that THE Princeton?" Yes, I replied, it was.

And I mentioned previously about the Princeton alumni pregame tent for the women's 15s finals in Tampa.

If Rice were to have a true Ivy-League athletic program, we would probably have to add at least 10 sports for men and 10-15 for women, and to take every one of them more seriously than we currently take football. That's kind of what Hambone has alluded to several times, that maybe a way to build the athletic program would be to focus on women's and Olympic sports, build a reputation there, and then transfer that to the money men's sports. Harry Fouke did that at UH, building around a golf program, so it can be done. And the advantages would be that those sports are not expensive, do not require a large number of athletes, and typically involve true student-athletes who would bring up the athletic program's SAT/ACT scores, GPAs, and academic progress rates.