There are plenty of issues in the Ivy League worth debating, from the lack of student-athlete scholarships, to the seven-week rest period rule, to the fact that our football champion does not have the ability to play for the FCS national championship. I could argue one way or another on each of the above topics and be pretty satisfied with the result. There is one Ivy League practice, however, that is so outdated and misconceived that every other conference in the country has changed its rules regarding the issue.
March Madness is a very exciting time of year for every college basketball program. That is, unless you root for a team in the Ivy League. Unlike every other conference in America, the Ivy League does not hold an end-of-the-year college basketball tournament. For the other conferences, this postseason tournament is of supreme importance, as the winner receives an automatic bid to play in the NCAA tournament. The Ivy League, however, chooses its representative by giving its automatic bid to the regular season conference champion.
Sure, the current system is fair -- but it is also boring. In basketball, March is a month for the surprising and the unexpected. The Ivy League has been all too predictable over the past few, well, decades. Last year, the Ivy League sent Cornell as its men's basketball representative, but other than that, since 1988, either Penn or Princeton has represented the Ivy League in the men's NCAA bracket. Are Penn and Princeton perennially the best teams? Sure, but in March, who cares? People would have a hard time arguing that George Mason was one of the best four teams in the country in 2006, but there they were in the Final Four.
On paper, an Ivy League conference championship looks like a no-brainer. At the end of the regular season, the League would seed the teams (one through eight) and play the entire tournament over a three-day span in one of the eight college towns. Each year, a different school would play host to the tournament (that's right, folks, our own Hanover, N.H., could play host to all eight Ivy League schools in a three-day basketball extravaganza!). I can envision Leede Arena packed with students hoping to see their very own Big Green try to pull off three straight victories and make it to the Big Dance.
Terry Dunn, the head men's basketball coach, when asked about the prospect of a conference tournament, said that although he "doesn't see it in the works, it has been talked about for awhile." He went on to say that "a tournament would help teams that are playing their best basketball at the end of the season. It would add excitement. I'm all for it."
Over the past few seasons, the Ivy League championship, and therefore the NCAA representative, has been basically locked up by mid-February. Where is the fun in that? Our conference has basically been reduced to a footnote on SportsCenter's bottom line in March.
While highlights from other leagues' championship games are shown in high definition, the Ivy League is essentially forgotten. Furthermore, the Ivy League representative rarely wins a game in the NCAA tournament, giving the Ivy League by far the fewest games in the month of March of any conference in Division I basketball. By clinging to an archaic, though fair system, the Ivy League has seen March Madness pass it by.
I agree with Jordan that the Ivy League football champion should be able to compete for a national championship, but there is no way to get around the fact that the Ivy League completely misses out on the greatest month in college sports. Sure, it would be fun to go watch the Ivy League football champion (likely Harvard or Yale) lose in the national quarterfinals each year, but I would opt for the excitement that the conference basketball championship would bring to the league, and, more specifically, the host school.
One could argue that, in changing one thing about the Ivy League, I neglected dozens of sports, and only focused on men's and women's basketball, but the lack of a conference tournament is so egregious precisely because it is such an easy fix. There is no reason at all for the Ivy League to continue to hold to some long-lost sense of tradition in the modern world of college sports. The chance to compete to get to the Big Dance is the essence of March Madness, and, while the Ivy League does offer this, it does so in the most boring way possible.
When everything boils down, sports, even college sports, are about entertainment -- and the Ivy League robs its fans of any such value.
