Don’t tell my parents this, but I chose Indiana University because of its athletics. Phew, that’s a weight off my shoulder that I could finally get that out. Don’t get me wrong, Indiana is a great school. There is a new media school opening up that fit my needs perfectly, and the campus is exactly what I want it to look like because I know it will make a good Snap story. But at the end of the day, I am at IU because I wanted to cheer on the Hoosiers basketball team in Assembly Hall for four years.
Indiana's athletics program is one of the top in the country. It has a basketball team with as much tradition as anyone else, a soccer team with championships up the hoo-hah, and the football team is up and coming (or at-least that’s what they’ve been saying).
How many people here have heard of Appalachian State University? Okay, put your hands down. Now how many of you have heard of Appalachian State University before they beat fifth-ranked Michigan on September 1, 2007? Yeah, exactly. An Appalachian State University study showed that, after interviewing 75 incoming freshmen, 25 percent of them said the football victory on that fall day led them to apply to the university located in Boone, NC.
I took it upon myself to go around the campus of IU and ask the question, “How much did athletics have to do with you coming to IU?” Here is what I got.
Two said none.
One said it played a part for sure.
One said it was pretty important, because they wouldn’t have gone to a D2 school.
Another said it’s all connected to the social scene.
Okay, so even though I was too lazy to ask more than the five people sitting around me, in my opinion the results I found were kind of surprising. It comes as a shock to me that more people didn’t admit that athletics have an effect on their decision. My question to them is, why didn’t you go to the a school like Miami of Ohio or some other middle-of-nowhere school that doesn’t have a great athletic program?
I went to this recently invented search engine called Google and searched "the most popular schools in the U.S.” I was directed to a site called CollegeChoice.net, where I found a list of the so-called "50 most popular schools in the U.S." I scrolled all the way down, not before stopping to see Indiana ranked at #13.
Here are the 10 most popular schools according to CollegeChoice.net:
- USC—123 national championships, football title in 2003 and 2004
- Illinois—18 national championships, basketball Final Four in 2005
- Purdue (ew)—Alumni include Drew Brees, Robbie Hummel, top notch basketball environment, DON’T HOLD THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET (shots fired!!)
- NYU *
- Columbia*
- UCLA—record for National Championships with 132; baseball title in 2013 along with a Sweet 16 appearance same season in basketball.
- Northeastern *
- Michigan—just signed biggest apparel deal ever with Nike/Jordan; plus, Saturdays at the Big House seem like a good enough attraction to “Go Blue”
- Michigan State—surprising since their academics don’t compare to the others on this list, but with seven Final Fours since 1999 and 2 Big Ten Football championships in last 5 years, go home academics you’re drunk.
- Penn State—107,000 screaming fans all in white on a Saturday in Happy Valley; sign me up.
* = Good for you, you decided to go to a college solely based on its higher standards of education. I’ll still be your boss one day, punk.
I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that college choices are based on athletics; these are the best four years of your life, so you might as well see a couple of national championships. Dream big and work hard, folks.
