I have a confession to make: I’m a grad student.

While that might not be the most shocking revelation, I still find it quite amazing how few of us are engaged with the athletic side of Stanford. We outnumber the undergraduates on this campus (8,352 full-time graduate students compared to 6,889 undergraduates, according to statistics released last October), but we’re a distant second in the bleachers and are all but non-existent on the field.

It also seems all of my fellow sports writers are undergraduates, and the rest of The Daily is not much different. Part of that is probably down to the fact that most grad students have already worked out what they want to do with their lives and are hidden away in their labs doing just that. But that doesn’t feel like a satisfactory excuse.

Graduate students are notoriously good at seeking out the free stuff available on campus, stretching out those bare-bones salaries with free food and entertainment. But when it comes to sports, I think they’re missing a trick. Not only is there sometimes food on offer at sporting events, but in the real world you’d have to pay hard cash to witness some of the games played here. Outside of football and men’s basketball, the student section can be pretty empty, and those that do show up seem to mostly be undergrads.

One of the main things keeping grad students away could be their alma mater. It is hard to honestly support two different schools because eventually there will come a time when they clash, either directly playing each other or simply playing at the same time, and you will be forced to take sides. When this happens, the sense of belonging born out of being part of a large undergraduate class easily beats the more isolated existence at graduate school.

A lot of us, though, are foreigners, and don’t have a traditional American college allegiance because of that simple fact. As an undergraduate I went to the University of Bristol in the U.K. and loved every minute of it; however, I have zero interest in its athletics because the only two U.K. college sports programs that even come close to the American model are the rowing teams of Oxford and Cambridge. This doesn’t, however, mean that the stands are teeming with non-resident aliens; while some of us, myself included, are intrigued to find out about the side of America so often glimpsed in college and high-school movies, many are simply just not interested in American sports.

What truly set the graduate and undergraduate bodies apart, though, are the basic rules of the NCAA on eligibility. They effectively rule that graduate students cannot represent their universities: Coterms can generally sneak in, but when push comes to shove, these are really just glorified seniors–undergraduates who, for admittedly valid reasons such as losing some of their NCAA eligibility to injury or wanting to add another qualification to their resume, have decided to forgo the real world for yet another year. Real grad students, the sort you’ll encounter if you venture far enough east on campus or deep enough into the bowels of the buildings around the Quad, are notable only for their absence from varsity teams.

I might simply be getting bitter in my old age, but this doesn’t seem fair. On physical grounds alone, 20-something-year-old grad students are not too old to play an active role within college teams–the best athletes, the professionals, are usually older than undergrads. As an analogy, I’m not talking about Masters Tennis, in which players too old to compete on the ATP Tour hang tough to the very end of their careers (save for the likes of Federer and Nadal, both now too old for NCAA rules anyway).

Accessibility to education is surely a major inspiration behind the NCAA’s restrictions, providing opportunities for skilled young athletes to gain an education that they might otherwise have been denied because of the costs involved. But the resulting system is flawed. Many athletes leave college before they finish their sought-after degrees, and thus, whether by choice or not, are denied that education; access to graduate education, something that can equally well transform someone’s job prospects and role in society, is often subject to exactly the same funding problems.

While undergrads have a deep and meaningful connection with the varsity teams, either playing on them or being able to cheer on dorm-mates, I can’t help wondering whether Stanford Athletics really, truly represents me. Perhaps the question I should be asking is not why there are so few grad students involved in sports here, but why am I?