All Sport Ratings 2021-22

[smedindy]

OK I did something here.

I took the Massey Ratings (I know, not perfect, but at least has these ratings) for these sports:

Football
Volleyball
Soccer (M&W)
Basketball (M&W)
Baseball
Softball

I threw out NESCAC football since they're not rankable. I then averaged the rankings.

Here are the Top 25 schools in these rankings among the 8 sports:

1   Chris Newport   25.13
2   Trinity TX   30.00
3   Tufts   32.00
4   WI Oshkosh   33.00
5   Emory   34.00
6   WI LaCrosse   34.86
7   Johns Hopkins   35.57
8   Washington StL   38.00
9   M Hardin-Baylor   39.88
10   WI Whitewater   42.13
11   Hope   46.25
12   Amherst   47.71
13   Babson   48.57
14   Calvin   48.71
15   Wartburg   52.63
16   Pomona-Pitzer   54.00
17   Washington & Lee   54.00
18   Middlebury   54.38
19   Chapman   56.63
20   Claremont M.S.   58.50
21   Randolph-Macon   58.50
22   Salisbury   60.63
23   Case Western   61.75
24   NYU   63.29
25   N Central IL   64.13


And the Bottom Ranks:
424   Old Westbury   376.43
425   Hilbert   377.14
426   Notre Dame MD   377.25
427   Cazenovia   378.00
428   Sarah Lawrence   381.83
429   Principia   382.86
430   Mt Mary   383.50
431   Warren Wilson   384.67
432   Agnes Scott   384.75
433   Sweet Briar   387.00
434   St Elizabeth   387.86
435   Summit   390.29
436   Bryn Athyn   390.40
437   Purchase   390.71
438   NVU-Lyndon   392.57
439   Wells   392.57
440   Pratt Inst   394.20
441   Maranatha Bap   396.14
442   NVU-Johnson   396.67
443   York NY   396.80
444   City Col NY   398.67
445   Alverno   400.50
446   Medgar Evers   406.00
447   Valley Forge   411.29
448   Trinity DC   417.00

You aren't penalized for a sport you don't play, BTW.

I have the entire spreadsheet if people want to gaze at it. It's all for fun.

[Ron Boerger]

Cool, that was a good deal of work to pull together.  How about attaching the spreadsheet to your original post?

[Gregory Sager]

This pretty much proves what I think most of us would suspect, if we ever got around to thinking about it: women's colleges tend to be really bad at intercollegiate sports. The effects seem to linger even after the school goes coed, in some cases for quite a few years.

The question "Why?" would be an interesting topic.

[Gray Fox]

This pretty much proves what I think most of us would suspect, if we ever got around to thinking about it: women's colleges tend to be really bad at intercollegiate sports. The effects seem to linger even after the school goes coed, in some cases for quite a few years.

The question "Why?" would be an interesting topic.

Endowment also seems to have an effect.

[Gregory Sager]

This pretty much proves what I think most of us would suspect, if we ever got around to thinking about it: women's colleges tend to be really bad at intercollegiate sports. The effects seem to linger even after the school goes coed, in some cases for quite a few years.

The question "Why?" would be an interesting topic.

Endowment also seems to have an effect.

Yeah, but that seems to me to be more of a no-brainer than coed vs. women-only as far as explanations are concerned. I'd like to know why skilled female student-athletes don't seem to want to enroll at women's colleges.

As far as the effect of endowment size is concerned, it does seem to be an important factor. But not every school listed in the upper tier is fabulously wealthy. The state schools are a very conspicuous exception (although Salisbury and Christopher Newport have endowments that are reasonably-sized by D3 standards). D3's state schools have an entirely different economic scale and a different set of explanations as to why the WIAC schools and the two Middle Atlantic outliers (CNU and Salisbury) are so outstanding at sports while the SUNYAC and Little East schools are so middling at just about everything and the MASCAC schools and the stray Vermont, Maine, and New York state schools not included in the SUNYAC and Little East are generally awful in terms of athletics.

It's also worth noticing that there are a few outliers in terms of each of the private schools in the upper tier being Moneybags U. While most of them have endowments that are in ten figures, and Chapman and Babson, with just over and just under half a billion in terms of endowment, respectively, also must be viewed as "haves" rather than as "have nots" by D3 standards, a few of these schools stand out in terms of their relative poverty. Hope (approx. $220m) is no pauper, either, but it's not in the big leagues in terms of financial resources. And there are three nine-digit-endowment schools south of $200m (Calvin, Randolph-Macon, and North Central IL), plus a veritable charity case in Wartburg at around $60m (which is still above the median average for D3, IIRC). It's worth asking what those five schools are doing -- or what sort of innate advantages they have -- that allow them to compete with the NESCACs and the WIACs and the UAAs for all-sports supremacy.

Of course, the flip side is true, too. There's the so-called D4 schools that are more well-endowed than Dolly Parton and can boast of quite a bit of academic cachet, but which almost seem to consider it a black eye if one or more of their sports teams are successful -- the Oberlins, Carletons, Macalesters, and MWC schools of the world. Their lack of success proves that it's not just about endowment size, it's about institutional support as well.

[Caz Bombers]

William Smith, Smith, and Wellesley are overall strong. The rest as Greg noted are not.

Interesting to me that Smith and Wellesley succeed in the NEWMAC while Mount Holyoke very much doesn't. It must be a dichotomy like Vassar vs Bard. They attract different kinds of students.

[smedindy]

It seems success breeds success.

And not all endowment is created equally. Endowment can be a measure of some support, but endowments for the most part are earmarked for certain programs or areas. Big endowments at research universities tend to be earmarked for that research, but it can free up general funds for use by athletics.

Some states also have different rules on what funds can be used for athletics in state institutions. In WA we can't build purely athletics facilities using state funds. If we hold classes in the building, it's OK to ask the state for funds to help in construction.

As for former all women's colleges, I look at Wells. It has been 15+ years since it went co-ed. They're pretty awful in everything, but their men's sports have a higher ranking than their women. They were 2nd worst in women's basketball (2-22, with the only wins against Penn St-Berks), and worst in softball (0-30, scored 45 runs all year, gave up 598). I don't know what to make of that except that with teams this wretched, no one goes there to play sports. They just happen to play sports (kind of the old Cal Tech thing). They're a very small campus with a small endowment. I think that may be the double whammy.

Their league is very weak as well. Wells' MBB was 17-9 and ranked #330 in Massey.