Montana would mercy rule the best Ivy school if there were a mercy rule in CFB.
Currently, the IVY league has 7 players in the NFL. The Missouri Valley Conference has 4x that amount with 28 players. The Big Sky has almost 3x that amount with 19 players.
I would like to see a breakdown over the last 30 years of FCS conferences producing NFL players. Much has changed with many 1AA schools moving to 1A. Obviously, the Missouri Valley Conference has always been pretty damn good but there was a time when the A10/Yankee/CAA/Southern Conferences were regulars at producing NFL talent. Many of those schools have made the jump to 1A obviously.
I'm a huge NDSU fan but much of their prominence in the past 15-20 years coincides with many of those 1AA's jump to 1A - Marshall, GA Southern, App State, etc..
Nowadays what we call FCS in many regards is what like the PSAC was 25 years ago. Schools like RMU/Duquesne would struggle to beat IUP/West Chester/Bloomsburg/Slippery Rock etc of the 90's? Why? More scholarships are available for those 1AA's. The PSAC is good football but it's a shadow of what it used to be. Case in point, you'd rarely see some of these PSACs dipping into out of state kids. Now you just find a stud kid who isn't a 1A kid and hope he qualifies for a Pell Grant and give him a 1/2 scholarship and he goes to school for damn near free.
