Penn State has been called Linebacker U, Iowa takes pride in being Tight End U and lately Oklahoma has been Quarterback U.
Who is the Linebacker U of the Ivy League? Or Tight End U? Or Quarterback U, or any of the other position groups? That was the premise for a study of Ivy League football teams over both the last 10 years and the last 20 years that will appear here each day while Mrs. BGA and I spend the next two weeks at our oceanfront camping hideaway on the West Coast.
The study used the All-Ivy League teams as the baseline, assigning an admittedly arbitrary five points for each first-team selection, three points for each second-team choice and one point for each honorable-mention pick. The total points for each position from 2002 through 2022 and the percentage of available points were calculated for each school. The titles Linebacker U, Running Back U etc., were given to the schools that claimed the highest percentage of available points.
Things got a little tricky with the Ivy League making occasional changes in how teams were chosen. The fullback category eventually disappeared and so the decision was made to put fullbacks into the running backs fold. For several years there were H-backs listed and for purposes of this study they were considered tight ends. For a few years players on the offensive line were tagged by position but because they wasn't consistent – even within a particular year – for this purpose an offensive lineman is just that. An offensive lineman. What to do with wildcat quarterbacks was a concern, and because they took snaps the decision was made to categorize them as quarterbacks.
It would have been easier if there were 11 players chosen each year for the first team, 11 for the second and a fixed number of honorable-mention choices, but it didn’t work that way. The numbers, particularly on the second team, would regularly vary. It was the same at individual positions where numbers could go up and down according to the talent in the league and the Ivy League didn't make collecting these data easy by some years listing honorable mention by position, some years by school and some years seemingly at random.
The spreadsheet detailing the All-Ivy history had 160 cells (20 years x eight teams) each for offensive line, tight end, wide receiver, running back, quarterback, kicker, defensive line, linebacker, defensive back and punter for a total of 1,600 cells. That number grew once the Ivies started recognizing return specialists in 2009.
Pulling this together was a eye-blurring undertaking made harder because the Ivy League’s online archives for football go back only to 2017 and the so-called “Ivy League Football Record Book” is something less than user friendly. Dartmouth’s media guides were a huge help but even there the honorable mention selections listed only Big Green players until 2007.
Also keep in mind, this was done without a second set of eyes checking every entry. Could there be an occasional player who made honorable-mention who was overlooked or a few other mistakes? Guaranteed.
But in the final analysis, the difference between a school earning 15.3 percent of the possible All-Ivy points at a position and a school earning 15.1 percent and because of the possibility of the occasional minor data entry error isn’t significant anyway. The real value of this effort, if any, is in painting a larger picture of where there really are significant differences and trends.
The first position group to be charted is the offensive line, and that will appear tomorrow. It will be followed in order by tight end, wide receiver, running back, quarterback, kicker, defensive line, linebacker, defensive back, punter and return specialist. The last few days of the series will take a look at one person's opinion of the best runs of All-Ivy production at each position group, drawn from a statistical breakdown.
So there you have it. Mrs. BGA and I will be airborne by the time you read this. Barring the decision to chuck it all and buy a tiny house overlooking the Pacific Ocean or being washed away by the latest storm on the West Coast, BGA Daily will resume regular operation on March 29 and BGA Premium will kick back into gear for the first spring practice on April 4.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Our flight was slated to take off at 5:25 a.m. today, the better to get us to our campsite overlooking the Pacific Ocean with plenty of daylight remaining. Lucky us, early yesterday afternoon we received a notification that our flight had been canceled and we've been rebooked. Now our first stop on the way to Chicago is in . .. wait for it ... Orlando. We now are slated to land in San Diego just before midnight. Then, if we are lucky and can get our car, we get to head 45 minutes away and try to set up a tent in total darkness - if we can get into the campground.
EDITOR’S NOTE II: As it turns out we are still in Manchester. Our flight was canceled for a second time. Instead of waking up to the sound of the Pacific outside our tent we awoke to the sound of snowplows. Stay tuned.
EDITOR’S NOTE III: just received word tomorrow's flight has been cancelled. Ugh.
EDITOR’S NOTE IV: They have rebooked us for FRIDAY! This is not OK.
