Ivy League Representation

Some rookies, especially undrafted players, haven’t gotten a lot of media attention. I’ve found that, when interviewing them for a story and not much background information available, their college days are a solid conversational starting point.

It helps when there’s a built-in association to their school, like Bobby Bowden and Florida State for WR Richard Goodman, or Ivy League with Cornell and WR Bryan Walters (who happen to be locker room neighbors).

So I did a little digging and found that 14 current players are Ivy League alumni.

Here’s the breakdown:

Brown (6)
Harvard (5)
Cornell (2)
Princeton, Pennsylvania (1)
Columbia, Dartmouth, Yale (0)

Seven of them are rookies. That number is highly likely to shrink by September. Even so, the original 14 represents about .58 percent of the NFL, a miniscule number.

Cornell, of course, reached the Sweet Sixteen this year before losing to Kentucky, a highlight of Walters’ senior year and perhaps the finest athletic accomplishment for the Big Red.

I find it fascinating that potential NFL players can face much different alternate career prospects. Guys like Walters, which an economics degree, don’t have trouble earning a comfortable pay if they don’t make it. Others would experience more than an appreciable dropoff, particularly those whose families are counting on them to lift an entire group of people out of poverty.

It doesn’t seem to affect the outcome much at the professional level, where outliers don’t stretch far from the mean. Professional athletes, in general, live up to the first word of this sentence regardless of their background and motivation.

So how does SoCal compare to his native Seattle and his college home in upstate New York?

“It’s sunny here every day. That’s nice. In Seattle, if you get a sun day, ahh, it’s awesome,” Walters said. ”This (overcast and cool) is kind of how it is in Seattle every day. It’s nice being in the same time zone. Coming from New York to San Diego, I pretty much feel like I’m home because of the West coast.”

Stay true and keep pounding,
Christopher