Although the 161 baseline still applies to individual players, the hockey and basketball recruits will not be admitted if their scores would cause the team's average to fall below the mean of the College.

This can sometimes result, however, in drastic gaps between players' scores.

Consider the case of Doug M. Sproule '98, a hockey player who scored close to 1500 on his SAT I.

"My scores made the process much easier," Sproule says. "Because my scores allowed me to be above average for the index, letting me in actually lets the guy below me in too. It averages out, and they don't have to have other guys well above the index."

The case is somewhat different for football, which doesn't fall under the team-wide index, but instead categorizes its players by "banding" or deviations determined by the school's academic mean.

According to Fitzsimmons, Harvard can admit 10 players into the lowest band, the band where scores lie two deviations below the academic mean. The other twenty-five recruits admitted in any given year must fall within or above one standard below the mean.

"There's not any question that admissions is a challenge for us, but [the admissions office] is generally right, and case by the case they've been very fair," says Murphy. "Usually our recruits are in the top ten percent of their [high school] class, which is most important, and their test scores are virtually always 1200 and above."

Other coaches say their players are of the same academic caliber as the average Harvard student.

"You pick any group of 22 students, pick them out of a hat, and I'll put my players up against them," Wheaton says, adding that two of this year's top recruits both have combines SAT scores of more than 1500.

Index Jockeying

Both banding and team-wide indices are sources disagreement between Harvard and other Ivy League schools.

All seven of the other Ivies, most significantly Penn and Cornell, have lower index scores. This allows these schools to recruit from a wider pool of applicants.

Understandably, Harvard doesn't like this.

"Harvard has been known to be concerned that other schools are allowed to have football teams whose [academic] standards are not as high as its own," says a spokesperson from the ivy League's headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reardon notes the discrepancy between Harvard's admissions standards and those of other schools.