KING JAMES BIBLE: Ivy Council Must Address Football

It’s one of the highlights on the Harvard Athletic Department’s website. Posters advertising the event claim vast areas of House bulletin boards.

The Harvard men’s and women’s tennis teams will be starting their NCAA tournament runs at the Beren Tennis Center this weekend and the excitement seems to be catching on.

The anticipation is warranted. Participating in NCAA tournaments and earning that opportunity to compete for a national title is what drives collegiate athletes to exert the tremendous effort that they devote to their sports. It’s also what drives college sports fans to hop on the bandwagon of teams in every sport, even if they’ve hardly noticed them throughout the regular season.

Every sport but one that is.

(If a neon sign flashing “football” just went off in your head, you probably know where I’m going with this. Or you need a CAT scan.)

Last week, I pointed out that the Council of Ivy Group Presidents—a terribly inefficient name for a group that puts terribly inefficient restrictions on Ivy athletics—will be meeting next month to debate the league’s approach to sports. I also pointed out some of the ridiculous rules that the group has passed.

I promised myself not to mention the most ridiculous item of them all, the Ivy ban on participation in the I-AA football playoffs. But after being reminded about the madness by the spring football game and the NCAA berths of the two tennis teams, well, here we go again.

This is a list of Harvard teams that are eligible to participate in the postseason:

Baseball, basketball, crew, cross-country, fencing, field hockey, golf, ice hockey, lacrosse, sailing, skiing, soccer, softball, squash, swimming, tennis, track, volleyball, water polo and wrestling.

And the list of squads that are ineligible for the postseason:

Football.

Doesn’t anyone else see anything wrong with this?

And through it all that’s not the frustrating part. Nor is the self-imposed hamstringing of the Ivy football programs by the limits on recruiting, the limits on coaching and the limits on practice time.

The frustrating part is that despite putting Ivy football teams at a severe competitive disadvantage, the teams still find a way to contend on a national level.

It was an embarrassment and a disgrace to sit an undefeated and No. 8 Penn team down without giving them a chance to vie for the national title.

But next year will be worse.

Penn should start out higher in the I-AA preseason polls than in seasons past, removing the “no matter how well we do, this is the highest ranking we can achieve” impediment. Harvard returns all its skill position players save Rodney Byrnes from a team that, a year ago, seemed poised for an undefeated season until the injury to junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. One of these two teams could rank well inside the top 10 in the nation.

What better time than now to end this inequitable ban?

In such a discussion, the Presidents

should consider the primary question raised by the listing of the sports above. What makes football so different? Why is football singled out?

Better yet, it would be beneficial for the Presidents to address the issue of why a majority of their recent restrictions have dealt with football. What is the motivation for making football the target of attack?

Or, maybe they can discuss why some Ivy schools spend as much as 25 percent of their budget for men’s sports on football and then prohibit the team from competing on a national level.

The singling out of football must come to an end. The excuses given for it are ridiculous. This spring meeting would be the perfect time for the Council to drop back but not pass on reassessing the situation.

Meanwhile, I’ll be shifting my focus back to tennis, because I, for one, appreciate the universal drama that is the NCAA tournament.

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