Crimson Fourth In All-Time Ivy League Victories

The round-robin football schedule announced last week by the Ivy Group for 1956 represents the culmination of a process that has been evolving for more than 50 years. The eight members of the group--Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale--have been playing each other regularly since the 1890's, and the newest rivalry within the group, Columbia vs. Brown, is 52 years old.

Up to this year, a total of 976 games has been played between Ivy foes, starting with the Columbia-Yale game of 1872, which Yale won, 3-0.

Yale has been most successful down through the years, with 190 Ivy victories, 95 defeats and 26 ties for a percentage of .652. An odd coincidence is that the all-time standings run in reverse alphabetical order. After Yale come Princeton, .619; Pennsylvania, .593; Harvard, .537; Dartmouth, .4364; Cornell, .4360; Columbia, .312; and Brown, .263.

Crimson Unbeaten

As early as 1901, the Crimson met five of the seven Ivy opponents in one season, and won all its games that year. Until the early 1930's, however, it was extremely rare for any team to play more than four Ivy games in a season, with many playing only two or three. Through the 1930's, most Group members increased their Ivy schedules, and since 1945, when the first presidents' agreement set up a formal Ivy Group (although not a formal league), the trend towards a complete round-robin has been a steady one, as evidenced in the Ivy members' schedules.

Unofficial standings for Ivy competition back to 1900 show that every team has won at least one "championship," and that only Pennsylvania, in the war years 1940 through 1945, has been able to win more than two consecutive "undisputed titles." The Crimson has won eight times outright and shared two other championships; it last win came 35 years ago, however, in 1919.