It is basically a marketing expense. There are countless reports of applications going up due to a successful sports team. When applications go up, a school can be more selective and choose better students. More selectiveness and better students will lead to a higher academic prestige. Basically anything that makes a school more attractive will eventually help bolster academic prestige.

When the Virginia Tech football team made it big, the average incoming SAT score increased markedly.

A quick look for historical data failed, but if you can find the data, the big shift should have occurred with the class matriculating in 1994±1.

Correlation is not causation, but it's not implausible that notability in athletics can have sympathetic effects for funding and student quality.

If only there were a daily 'Science' section in the newspaper to go alongside 'Sports'....

Eh, I can see it for undergraduate admissions, etc. I'm very skeptical as well.

However, I know some very smart people who did actually choose their undergraduate program based partly on the football team.

I chose my school partly because I followed the basketball team as a kid. It's free marketing. I never heard of half of the small division III schools in my area, but all of the big state schools were on my radar because of sports.

>It's free marketing.

Expensive marketing.

that's a big chunk of everything,

when you buy a pop out of the machine, what fraction of what your paying for is raw material + production cost and what percentage is so the can pay for superbowl ads so the next time you're thirsty their brand is the first the pops into your head?

where you go for undergraduate engineering isn't that big of a deal, right?

In my case I said no to a top 10 engineering undergraduate school offering some scholarship and yes to the University of Alabama which was my grandad/dad's alma mater and thus our football team, an in-state school with cheaper tuition offering a lot of scholarship, and not Auburn University which had a slightly better engineering program rank but were UofA rivals. Had a _great_ uni experience and would make the same choice every time.

Had no trouble getting a job in a large company as a kernel developer straight from uni. Sure maybe doing MIT or Stanford I could have been a HVT for ~Google or I would have been in an impromptu startup by junior year.. but those student ticket prices!!!

Roll Tide. Still fly back a few times per season to go to games.