Major....Please, this is such a bad argument.  There is no way the CURRENT improvement in athletics is due to the increased number of, as you said, NERDS at your school.  It has to be the new facilities.  Your going to get, on recruiting trips, more people to come to play for you if you show them a brand new sports facility coupled with a school of strong academic tradition.  There is no way your players are taken from the student body.  You may get an invitation to come and try out TWO WEEKS EARLY if you played in hs and were already accepted, but there is no way the team consists of just walk ons.  If that were the case in football, you would go 1-9 every year, because of the nerdiness of your school.  See my last post to see how recruiting works in D3, in particular, at UAA schools.

why is this an argument...schools such as Case, CMU, Chicago, Washington, etc won't recruit you if your not a good student the same as a Div I school will not recruit you if your not a div I level player.  With this being said, no college coach is simply going to leave his team to the whim of the random people that come into the classes.  If that where the case the schools mentioned before wouldn't even have teams, because only 20 people would come out.  It would make sense that the coaches of these schools only recruit the athletes that are BOTH good enough students to be accepted to the school AND good enough football players to be on a college team.  Now the coaches can't make all of these finds, so I would assume that they're primarily going to recruit the people that send them videos or contact them or they see at a camp etc.  And if that doesn't happen, they by word of mouth... as we have seen can happen.  Remember, these aren't the blue chippers, so they have to make contact w/ a college coach or have a local coach recommend them for interest to be spurred.  Now, given that I'm sure recruiting is harder for schools such as Case, CMU, WashU, Chicago and the classes of freshmen recruits coming may be smaller than other schools, it wouldn't hurt to call up an already accepted student who played football in hs (Major) and tell them that they could come try out for the team.  If the reputation for the notorious nerdyness in Case, CMU, Chicago and WashU is true, if the football teams would composed of only walk-ons from these nerdy schools, the 4 above mentioned teams would round out the bottom 5 NCAA Div III schools nicely.  As it is, all of your programs have respected histories, so I doubt thats the case.