CFA White Paper

The Most Critical Things to Advance Cornell Football

Streamline the Admissions Process:

  • Adherence to the Ivy League Agreement of Admissibility (Academic Index), or equivalent. The Academic Index is a formula using an Un-weighted GPA and Standardized Test Scores. It is monitored, regulated, and assigned by the Ivy League.
  • Remove University self-imposed additional steps to pre admission process. The biggest of these is the Cornell Supplemental Essay during the pre-read process.
  • Colleges should be rewarded for being Athlete friendly, or mandated to include football players because they are viewed as valuable members of the University community that will enhance and enrich the university experience by providing a championship level football program.
  • The relevance and importance of a "Marquee Football" program at the highest levels of the university must be made known. If it's not important to them, why should it be important to us?

Award Match Initiative (AMI) – True 100% Match:

  • Aggressive, Proactive matching of financial aid methodology and 100% matching of other Ivy League Financial Aid offers.
  • Currently, the proactive packages work very well for the most part. We are in great shape financially, thanks to the generosity of Art/Audrey Wolcott and Seneca Foods, but fall short in some cases where the university uses a different methodology to evaluate a prospective student-athletes financial picture.
  • We need to match a bona-fide offer in every case - specifically when non-custodial parents are involved.
  • A "match" MUST be a "match, PERIOD!

Win Big Red (WBR) Initiative:

  • We must use the hierarchical structure of the existing WBR network as a vehicle to improve communication and promote initiatives on behalf the Cornell football Association and for the betterment of the program.
  • Issues of self-sustainability (endowment) must be carefully balanced with current use programmatic needs in order to appropriately assess and fund both.
  • The promotion of CFA membership efforts/events/activities as well the coaches "wish list" and periodic informational programmatic updates are examples of uses for the WBR platform.
  • Not only will WBR provide information to its members, stakeholders and friends of football; as importantly, it will also stress the "Will to Win" with our university partners, as well as address matters of importance to Cornell Football and the many benefits a competitive athletic program can bring to the student-athlete, its faculty and the university as a whole.