Ivy Presidents Listen Up: Football Needs Playoffs

It wasn’t always this way.

The Game wasn’t always The End.

In 1952, the Ivy League presidents decided to abolish athletic scholarships and spring practices. They also prohibited teams from competing in postseason football games. Harvard would never again have the chance to repeat its 1920 campaign, in which it went 9-0-1 and defeated Oregon 7-6 in the Rose Bowl for the last of its nine national titles.

I am not suggesting that we need to put Harvard back in the Rose Bowl. In fact, barring a complete change in the Ivy League’s attitude toward its football programs, the 1978 decision to split Division I into I-A and I-AA will keep that from ever happening again. However, I am demanding that Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League let its players compete in the Division I-AA playoffs. I’m also demanding that we give our students and our fans a reason to care.

Ten years ago, the Ivy Council of Presidents determined that in order for our football teams to remain competitive, the Ivy League would have to re-institute spring practices. Now, it’s time to end the ban on postseason participation.

Penn or Princeton advances to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament every year. Harvard stunned top-seeded Stanford in the 1998 NCAA women’s basketball tourney. Why do we let the best teams in every sport save football compete for the ultimate prize?

According to an article that ran in the Daily Pennsylvanian on September 18th, Penn President Judith Rodin claimed that a football postseason would conflict with finals. She’s partially right. If the Ivy champion advances to the semifinals of the I-AA playoffs, that team will be playing football during the exam period for schools with pre-Christmas finals. But, as the article cites, the same situation exists for the NCAA women’s volleyball tournament, and the Ivy Council of Presidents has no problem sending the league champion off to compete in that playoff bracket.

In fact, the two situations are amazingly similar. Both tournaments would require that the team make the semifinals before there would be a conflict with finals. For some reason, we let the volleyball team duke it out and send the football team back to class.

In the same article, the executive director of the Ivy League Council of Presidents Jeff Orleans says that finals aren’t the issue. Instead, Orleans believes that after careful consideration “there was a general consensus that [competing for the Division I-AA title and not an all-encompassing Division I title] is not necessary.” In other words, the Ivy presidents believe that competing for a Division I-AA Championship is beneath them.

And why should they? They get everything they want out of our football players during the Ivy season. The presidents have no motivation to send 70 kids to Montana for a playoff game. That doesn’t draw alums to Harvard Stadium, where—overcome by nostalgia—they decide to give copious amounts of money to pad our cushy endowment. In the end, the ban on the I-AA playoffs seems to be more of a business decision than a decision based on concern for our players. That’s probably why the presidents—not the athletic directors—have the final voice on this issue. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why the presidents would claim that the I-AA title doesn’t matter.

Later in the article, Orleans responds to comments that the ban discriminates against football players and that participation would result in a better national reputation for the Ivy League.

“Those folks who want to go into the playoffs cite those possible reasons,” Orleans said. “We happen to feel differently.”

By “those folks” he means the coaches, the athletic directors—who are paid to make athletic decisions—the fans, the media that follow I-AA football, and the NCAA in general. By “we,” he means the Ivy presidents. The presidents are sticking by their decision, and they don’t care how many people disagree or how strong their arguments are against the policy.

For proof of their obstinate behavior, I recall an article from the Cornell Daily Sun that ran nearly 18 months ago. According to the article, Princeton football coach Roger Hughes had an interview with outgoing Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro. In that interview, Shapiro told Hughes that there was no logical reason for the postseason ban and that the presidents just didn’t want Ivy League teams participating. It seems the presidents gave the Ivy playoff decision about as much thought as whether to have steak, pheasant or duck for lunch.

Is stubbornness the Ivy presidents’ only argument? In a desperate search for something more, I contacted Orleans.

“As noted, individual presidents give different weights to the various specific issues you identify (e.g., participation in championships in other sports, possible academic effects for players on competing teams, the nature of the I-AA playoffs),” Orleans wrote in an e-mail. “The presidents review this issue periodically, and in trying to find the right balance they are aware of, and consider, the views of administrators, coaches and athletes. While each Ivy president approaches this topic from his or her own personal and institutional perspective, there is at this time a clear consensus about Ivy teams not participating in the playoffs.”

Thank you, Jeff.

And so, I was still left searching. If I understand the statement, it reads: ‘we know why there should be playoffs, but we think there shouldn’t be.’

Undaunted, I went out in search of any “personal and institutional perspectives” that I could find from Ivy presidents in order to shed some light on their decision making processes.

Four years ago, former Brown President Gordon Gee told the Brown Daily Herald that he felt the rule would be changed. In fact, Gee went on to say that he thought the ban would be overturned soon as a matter of equality. His only reservation was that a sport like football, which has a roster of over 70 people, would have a much greater academic impact on its student athletes than any other sport.

That would be strong argument if it were true. Football teams miss approximately five school days per year, leaving one day early for away games. That’s it. And that’s only the pared down traveling squad.

Compare that to the Crimson men’s hockey team, composed of over 25 players, which will play 30 games, many of which occur on the road during the week. No one’s telling them to cut their schedule. No one’s telling them that the ECAC and NCAA Tournaments don’t matter. Well, at least not yet.

Since the presidents’ public statements contain little in the way of a reason for their verdict, I think it’s worthwhile to speculate about what the true causes are.

Maybe the presidents don’t agree with the way mainstream college sports in this country are run. Maybe they dream of the day when Ivy football teams are even further removed from mainstream Division I football, playing only a seven game schedule against their fellow Ivy schools. Maybe they couldn’t care less what the athletic directors, coaches and players think or want. Maybe they ultimately seek to make winning of minimal importance. Maybe they don’t care that they treat our football players unequally.

Just for a second, let’s try to see the argument from the presidents’ perspective. Their actions at this year’s Ivy Council of Presidents’ meeting seem to show that they’re not too fond of recruiting football players. That’s why they chose to increase the minimum Academic Index requirement—2/3 based on SAT scores and 1/3 based on class rank—that players need in order to be considered for acceptance. They also reduced the number of football players that can be recruited per year. The Harvard College admissions website says, “There is no formula for gaining admission to Harvard,” but that seems to only apply if you’re not a football player.

Now, imagine for a moment if we sent a team to the playoffs and they won. Then, the presidents would feel pressure from alumni to keep fielding title contending football teams. Football players would become the spotlight figures on campus, and the Ivy League educational experience would fall apart. (It has to look this grim to the presidents or else they would have caved in to logic a long time ago). But if they can keep Pandora’s box shut, they can continue to diminish the presence of football players on campus and achieve greater diversity by phasing out athletes.

Despite the presidents’ strong desire to keep Ivy League football sheltered from the national stage, the conference has begun to flourish. This year, Ivy League football has had more than ten games televised either regionally or nationally. In fact, this year’s Harvard-Yale game will be carried by the national cable channel WGN out of Chicago. This television explosion is the culmination of a trend which has led Ivy League football back to national prominence. And the quality of play has risen too. In the last few years Harvard and Penn have spent time in the national rankings. Penn is currently eighth in the Sports Network national poll.

If this trend continues, we could see an Ivy League team ranked in the top five of the national polls in the not too distant future. If that team were unable to compete in the I-AA tournament, all hell would break loose. There would always be an asterisk by that year’s title, as everyone would be left to wonder if the Ivy powerhouse could have beaten the eventual champion. The other I-AA institutions would loudly criticize the Ivy League’s postseason ban as out-of-date and elitist. The NCAA would have a mess on its hands. But our eight fearless leaders would be happy, because they kept our coaches and players at home where they could be easily accessible to reporters asking how it feels not to compete, instead of actually allowing the players to go out and prove their abilities.

Not only is it ridiculous to preserve this system in its present state, it’s also not fair. The Ivies are the only league in all of Division I football that limits a team’s accomplishment to a conference title. The Ivy League schedules games against I-AA powerhouses Villanova, Lehigh, and Northeastern. I wonder what’s more agonizing—winning or losing. If you lose, you feel the pain of knowing you don’t belong. If you win, it’s the pain of knowing you do.

Beyond the players, it’s not fair to the fans. To a lot of us college football is life. We’ve followed our favorite teams for years. We’ve seen the screaming fans in the stadium, with their faces painted and their chests marked, holding that sole index finger in the air—the universal sign of being No. 1. But at Harvard, in the Ivy League, something’s missing. We show up from time to time to hallowed Harvard Stadium, encouraging our team with raised voice, cautiously applying our facial paint, and putting that big H on our New England induced pale-white torsos. But we never wave our index fingers in the air. Because we know that eight stubborn administrators will never give us the chance to truly back it up.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.