Bye Bye 'Bama Bantams?

Alabama, which will begin it's first season as a varsity program next year, recently named its club program coach as its first varsity coach. During his tenure as club coach, Larry Davis coached Alabama to a lightweight eight victory at the Head of the Chattahoochee. It would be nice to believe that this will make him sympathetic to keeping lightweight representation in Alabama crew, but the actions of other new varsity programs suggests this won't be so. No doubt Coach Davis is already preparing to begin the national heavyweight scavenger hunt in which demand far outstrips supply. I've already mentioned my belief that Big Ten schools are particularly prone to drink the heavyweight Kool-Aid, but more specifically, I think that the average weight of a school's women's varsity crew is directly proportional to the prominence of its football team. (Stanford and Wisconsin, with varsity lightweights, are two exceptions that prove the rule.) Think of Notre Dame, Michigan, and Tennessee. Then think of lightweight schools Princeton, Radcliffe, and Georgetown. I suppose we can call this the Football Theorem. I don't know why this is, other than to speculate that the student populations at these schools have already shown themselves able to tolerate the carnival atmosphere caused by having abnormally large people walking around campus.

In any case, perhaps Coach Davis at Alabama will prove this theorem wrong. [See my update here.]