Director's Cup

There is an all-sports award in college athletics that is given to the school with the most combined points from all NCAA championship sports at the end of the school year. It sounds great and I am a big fan of having an all-sports champion. That is a great measure of the success of a school's athletic program success (we'll ignore graduation rates for the moment because that, while it should be more important in the life of a student athlete, is on the academic side). I only have one beef with the Director's Cup, but it is a big one.

If your favorite college has an ski team, raise you hand. How about men's gymnastics? Anyone for a rifle team? In a room filled with graduates from across the America, few hands would go up for any of these sports. This is the problem I have with the Director's Cup. A minor sport like women's bowling carries the same weight as a sport with much higher participation like basketball. I'm not here to convince you that basketball carries more weight than bowling because you already know that, but I do think it offers a tremendous advantage to merely participate in as many sports as possible.

This is why Stanford wins the Director's Cup every year. Are they truly the best athletic program in the country? No. They are good, but they just field a team in almost every sport known to the NCAA and in the Director's Cup, participation is more than half the battle. Here is an example of where Stanford's winter points came from in 2008-09. They lead all schools with 631.25 points in the winter sports. That total includes 100 points from men's gymnastics for winning the national championship. While that is an impressive accomplishment, it is important to know that 16 teams in the country field a men's gymnastics team. That is about the same as winning your conference in football, basketball, or any number of other large participation sports. Do we really equate being valedictorian of a 16 person class with being the top graduate of a school of 345?

My answer is "no" so I am setting out to find who is truly the best college athletic program in the country by offering up a revised Director's Cup. My award will be given to the school that has the best overall showing in major college sports. I want to name it after major figures in college sports over the years. The first names that came to mind are legendary college coaches Paul "Bear" Bryant and John Wooden, so I'm calling the award the Wooden Bear Award.

Okay we have a name, now let's define some parameters. According to the NCAA website (http://web1.ncaa.org/onlineDir/exec/divisionListing), there are 348 Division I schools as of this writing. If you have fewer than 30% of schools participating in (or "sponsoring" in NCAA speak) a sport, I think you have to call that a minor sport and there is no room for any minor sports when competing for the Wooden Bear Award. I am eliminating any sport with fewer than 100 schools fielding teams which puts us a little under the 30% mark, but we all like round numbers so let's go with 100. For simplicity, I am keeping the same scoring model as the Director's Cup. That model awards 100 points for a national championship and goes down from there based on how far into the playoffs a team got, where or not they won a conference title, etc. At the end of the school year, after all of the Director's Cup points have been tallied, I will be able to determine who wins the Wooden Bear Award as the best major sport college athletic program in the country.

I will post the results here when I calculate them. All I need now is corporate sponsorship and this could really take off! All kidding aside, I do think this is a better indicator of which college athletic programs are returning the best results when facing the best competition. While I don't know that this happens, a college could cherry pick a few sports with lower participation rates and try to load up on point that way. Let's say women's bowling (32 schools), women's rifle (8), women's water polo (33), men's water polo (22), men's volleyball (23), and men's gymnastics (16) would be my sports. While teams from my school would still have to win to produce points, I think winning those would be a far cry easier than winning in men's and women's basketball, football, soccer, track & field, and tennis where sponsorship rates are very high. Do you stand a better chance being the valedictorian in a school of 8 or a school of 340?