Ivy On The Air

THE HUNDRED AND first Harvard-Yale football game was played on a very cold day. At half-time, deciding that self-preservation was a higher duty than school loyalty. I left the jey bleachers of Soldiers Field for the comfort and warmth of the Quincy House Junior Common Room, where I settled in with a dozen other refugees from Antarctica to watch our boys blow the most important game of the season. That's right, I watched them on television, just as if they were a "real college" like USC or Notre Dame.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, Ivy League football is on the air. Last June the Justices threw out the, NCAA's monopoly in making broadeast deals, allowing member schools to negotiate for TV rights on their own, Barney Frank, an executive at the sports promotion firm Trans World International, came up with the idea of an Ivy Group football package soon after the ruling. The plan's intention was not to displace Rose Bowl contenders from their commercial network homes, but rather to put the Ivy games on public, television, underwritten by corporate philanthropy a la "Masterpiece Theatre" or "Alastair Cooke's America." The Ivy Group, the official organization representing Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, and II, Penn, agreed, and thus was born the Public Broad casting Service's "Ivy Game of the Week." The first season saw the games air over twelve stations, including PBS powerhouses like Boston's WGBH, New York's, WNFE, and Pittsburgh's WOFD.

But would anybody except the past and present members of the Quincy JCR and their friends. Of course--watch cliffhangers' like Brown vs. Columbia? "Game of the Week" producer Greg Harney claimed audiences were about the same for Ivy football as for whatever the games replaced, but WQED program director Sam Silverman conceded that the show was "not a rating, success." WNFE President Jay Iselin '56 reported that his viewership was from 100,000 to 200,000 in the Greater New York area, the same for his how to shows on gardening and home repair.

In any event, the producers, the corporate underwriters, the Ivy Group, and the participating stations all seemed satisfied with the first season of the "Game of the Week," and plans are now in the works for a second season of Ancient Eight football. And that's quite understandable, at least from the viewpoint of the production side of the project. The games package cost over a million dollars last year, putting a considerable amount of money into the packages of the people responsible To airing the games Greg Harabey Productions, for example, picked up a tidy $45,000 for its work on the project. Sponsors like The Travellers insurance company found a relatively inexpensive way to tie themselves in with the happier collegiate memories of the presumably and well-educated audience of Ivy alumni and friends that would have the greatest interest in the games. And the Ivy Group itself received considerable exposure, which can translate into benefits ranging from enhanced fund-raising to increased applications.

THE PUBLIC TELEVISION stations, however, are harder pressed to explain why Ivy football should return. The tiny audience the games attracted doesn't exactly suggest that America has been waiting all these years to get a glimpse of Big Green football. Public television, however, doesn't exist solefy for big ratings--that's the job of ABC, CBS, and NBC, if PBS can serve a public need defined other than by the number of people who want to watch a given program, then by all means it should do so. That's how we end up with driver education programs, and documentaries on harp seals, and even "Monty Python's Flying Circus," none a ratings success, but each a legitimate use of the public airwaves. Public TV instructs, enlightens, and entertains in ways commercial networks just can't afford.

But Ivy football fails this test of non-ratings-based "merit." The players might have "Veritas" emblazoned on their spunfenes but Harvard Football hardly more more educational than the kind practiced by schools with easier admissions criteria. And there are plenty of these higher powered games duly broadcast their cheir Saturday by the big three networks. From the football fan's point of view, the Oha States and ECIA As of the world play football better than the Harvards and Yales. That's not a mark against anyone, that's just the way it is With all due respect to Joe Restic and his team, Harvard is still better known for its Glass Flowers than its football.

There's almost no audience demand for Ivy football, it has no exceptional educational merit, and there's a superabundance of football of all kinds on the commercial stations. Why do the public broadcasters seem so interested in having it? No station spokesman would give an answer beyond the need for PBS to have a "sports presence," or the way Ivy football players brought "perspective" back to winning and losing (tell that to the Crimson squad downed 30-27 by the Yalies last November). Producer Harney in fact, could "make no case for why we do these things. WNET's Iselin slied some light-though, when he mentioned the "grateful son of Eli" who sent him $50 in appreciation of the games. New York's public station took in an additional $1000 of donations each week the games were broadeast directly; and the stations all hope that the games generated untold good will among the people on whom public broadcasting depends the fairly well off folks who respond generously to the financial needs of the viewer supported public stations.

No doubt there're a few Ivy alumni in this group. PBS is, like its corporate" underwriters, pandering to the people who keep it afloat. That's too bad, but in a sense you can't really blame program directors and station-presidents--who decide to air a Dartmouth-Penn game instead of something else. Ivy games are certainly no criminal offense against PBS's mandate, and the public stations need all the good will they can get. Public broadcasting executives should start to ask themselves, though, how far they can go in sacrificing their programming and policy orientation as they squirm to keep their stations in the black. And the federal officials who manage public broadcasting's central inances should be wary of dangers to PBS's credibility as an impartial and pluralistic network. Meanwhile, however, on a somewhat selfish level. I'm glad we were able to watch Game 101 in the Quincy JGR. As Iselin, the Harvard alumnus who personally attended both the Brown and Columbia games, said, Crimson football "plays better on TV than in person" anyway:

THE PUBLIC TELEVISION stations, however, are harder pressed to explain why Ivy football should return. The tiny audience the games attracted doesn't exactly suggest that America has been waiting all these years to get a glimpse of Big Green football. Public television, however, doesn't exist solefy for big ratings--that's the job of ABC, CBS, and NBC, if PBS can serve a public need defined other than by the number of people who want to watch a given program, then by all means it should do so. That's how we end up with driver education programs, and documentaries on harp seals, and even "Monty Python's Flying Circus," none a ratings success, but each a legitimate use of the public airwaves. Public TV instructs, enlightens, and entertains in ways commercial networks just can't afford.

But Ivy football fails this test of non-ratings-based "merit." The players might have "Veritas" emblazoned on their spunfenes but Harvard Football hardly more more educational than the kind practiced by schools with easier admissions criteria. And there are plenty of these higher powered games duly broadcast their cheir Saturday by the big three networks. From the football fan's point of view, the Oha States and ECIA As of the world play football better than the Harvards and Yales. That's not a mark against anyone, that's just the way it is With all due respect to Joe Restic and his team, Harvard is still better known for its Glass Flowers than its football.

There's almost no audience demand for Ivy football, it has no exceptional educational merit, and there's a superabundance of football of all kinds on the commercial stations. Why do the public broadcasters seem so interested in having it? No station spokesman would give an answer beyond the need for PBS to have a "sports presence," or the way Ivy football players brought "perspective" back to winning and losing (tell that to the Crimson squad downed 30-27 by the Yalies last November). Producer Harney in fact, could "make no case for why we do these things. WNET's Iselin slied some light-though, when he mentioned the "grateful son of Eli" who sent him $50 in appreciation of the games. New York's public station took in an additional $1000 of donations each week the games were broadeast directly; and the stations all hope that the games generated untold good will among the people on whom public broadcasting depends the fairly well off folks who respond generously to the financial needs of the viewer supported public stations.

No doubt there're a few Ivy alumni in this group. PBS is, like its corporate" underwriters, pandering to the people who keep it afloat. That's too bad, but in a sense you can't really blame program directors and station-presidents--who decide to air a Dartmouth-Penn game instead of something else. Ivy games are certainly no criminal offense against PBS's mandate, and the public stations need all the good will they can get. Public broadcasting executives should start to ask themselves, though, how far they can go in sacrificing their programming and policy orientation as they squirm to keep their stations in the black. And the federal officials who manage public broadcasting's central inances should be wary of dangers to PBS's credibility as an impartial and pluralistic network. Meanwhile, however, on a somewhat selfish level. I'm glad we were able to watch Game 101 in the Quincy JGR. As Iselin, the Harvard alumnus who personally attended both the Brown and Columbia games, said, Crimson football "plays better on TV than in person" anyway: