Ivy Considers Leaving NCAA

Before the Super Bowl, there was the Yale Bowl. Before Chicago’s Soldier Field, there was Cambridge’s Soldiers’ Field. Before the Bowl Championship Series, there was The Game.

And before there were college athletics, there was college sport.

But as commercial television and intercollegiate football intersected in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the distinction between the two rapidly blurred, resulting in a fissure in the membership of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) which left the loosely-affiliated Ivy Group on the brink of withdrawing from the national body in favor of a small, self-contained conference.

Initially, the internal debate’s dominant voice came from those college administrators nationwide who decried the drop off in attendance that accompanied the nationwide airing of premier match ups each Saturday.

In response, the NCAA formed a 10-member committee to govern coast-to-coast coverage in 1952, which first responded to member schools’ complaints by implementing a game of the week policy which banned all other contests from the airwaves. Schools were limited to one appearance per year, but might be kept off the air altogether at the NCAA’s discretion, as Harvard was in 1952 when the DuMont network’s efforts to air The Game in New York were rejected by the NCAA, since NBC had placed the winning bid for the year’s exclusive broadcast rights.

But this accomplished little in the way of solving the problem. While the exodus from the stadiums to the couches was slowed by the restriction, attendance remained markedly down, even with just one game on television. The dissatisfaction of excluded programs—most vocally expressed by Pennsylvania Athletic Director Francis Murray, who insisted that the limitations be scrapped—mitigated those marginal gains, however.

“The present program has proved a complete failure and, in addition, clearly violates existing anti-trust laws.” Murray told The Crimson in 1952. “I am highly optimistic that it will be thrown out and a new plan substituted.”

Though Murray proposed a three-point revenue-sharing plan of his own to counter the extension of the television monopoly, he quickly fell under attack for his public criticisms of the NCAA policies, even within the Ivy Group, foreshadowing greater conflict to come.

When Yale Athletic Director Robert Hall, the architect of the NCAA plan and Murray’s primary adversary stepped down on May 13, 1953, the Ancient Eight’s relationship with the NCAA rapidly unraveled. Harvard rejected the NCAA television framework two days later and Yale withdrew on May 25.

“Thomas D. Bolles, Director of Athletics, announced last night that Provost Paul H. Buck with the approval of the Harvard Corporation voted against the National Collegiate Association’s football television policy for the 1953 season,” the College’s press release said. “Harvard intends not to be bound by any program restricting its right to decide independently when and to what extent it will televise athletic sports.”

Though both Harvard and Yale made no overtures to independently arrange a network broadcast arrangement, Pennsylvania almost immediately entered into such negotiations, while Princeton privately voted against the NCAA’s national blackout.

The coordinated moves prompted speculation that the Ivy schools might withdraw from the national body altogether despite denials from the colleges.

“We decided not to go along with the NCAA plan because we felt we should be responsible only to ourselves for our own decisions,” said Charles M. O’Hearn, assistant to Yale President A. Whitney Griswold. “We are acting independently on this issue and will do so on all policy issues.”

“We still consider ourselves members in good standing, and are only acting independently on this issue,” he said.

Officially, talk centered on the legality of the NCAA’s measures. The National Football League had pursued a comparable slate for its televised games, only to find itself the subject of a Justice Department anti-trust probe. Similar questions surrounded the NCAA’s monopoly status, and it was those concerns which were cited as the principle underlying the Ivies rejection of the television deal.

But internally at least, discussion of the NCAA’s inability to adequately resolve the simplest problems and talk of secession reached the highest administrative levels at each of the colleges, spurring a series of mutual reforms that bound their athletic programs together.

Whereas pressure from member schools had previously brought Murray in line when he spoke out against the television grid plan—some traditional opponents had gone so far as to drop the Quakers from their schedule—on Oct. 28, 1953 the eight schools agreed to strengthen their intra-conference calendars, implementing a round-robin schedule that guaranteed seven league games per season by 1956.

The move was widely perceived as indicating the group’s intent to create a cohesive unit strong enough to weather an NCAA boycott upon a break of any sort with the governing body, despite the pledge of the organization’s Eastern director not to bring any pressure and to allow Ivy programs to continue to compete against member schools.

“I don’t believe there’s any possibility of that coming—the Ivy colleges are active and interested members of the NCAA,” Asa Bushnell said. “I don’t think [the discontent expressed by both Harvard and Yale is] the feeling of even a sizable part. I think most of them are quite willing to go along with the NCAA on policy matters and let the Association make the policy decisions.”

“A break would be a blow to the NCAA, but I think it would be a far worse blow to the Ivy colleges themselves,” Bushnell added.

Still, the solidification campaign steadily advanced on Feb. 10, as the presidents from the informal Ivy Group reaffirmed their commitments to maintaining the purity of amateur athletics, breaking with the NCAA by banning both scholarships and spring football practice, while eliminating participation in bowl and all-star games. The Group additionally extended the round-robin scheduling format to all sports in which it was feasible, formally establishing what is now held to be the Ivy League.

In early April, 1954, in an attempt to appease the disenchanted union, the NCAA privately offered Harvard and Yale broadcast rights for their fall contest, hoping that President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 would be more amenable to strike a deal than his predecessor’s administration, particularly after Athletic Director Thomas D. Bolles expressed interest in revisiting the College’s position.

Though both sides publicly denied that such an offer had been made, the contract would have tentatively netted Harvard $30,000. But Pusey remained steadfast, rejecting the offer with Yale not far behind.

With the Ivy League and the Big 10 agitating for reform in the NCAA’s television policies, the move was widely perceived as a means to buy off the organization’s two most vocal opponents. But lingering resentment over the illegal monopoly and dissatisfaction with the commercialization of the college game due to its widespread appeal was reported to have guided the decision to remain committed to the previous non-compliance policy, while maintaining suspicion that a schism was in the works.

But as the months passed, the tension slowly dropped off as the Ivy Group failed to extricate itself from the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC), strongly in favor of the NCAA’s blackout plan, by continuing to use the league’s officials and remaining within the league’s governing infrastructure.

“The Ivy Group is just not ready to break away and become independent,” said Donald M. Felt, Assistant Director of Athletics in anticipation of the meting.

But the mounting pressure that the Big 10 and Pacific Coast Conference applied to the NCAA proved sufficient to maintain the national body’s unity.

Threatening to break away from the ECAC as a result of what the Big 10 labeled “unacceptable” television policies, the two western conferences countered with a less stringent regional broadcast policy—with eight weekends devoted to national coverage, five to regional action—that freed schools to air games in high demand on a local level without violating NCAA regulations.

The plan passed an NCAA vote 193-27, with Harvard voting against, though its objections to the plan were notably softened with the College leaving open the possibility of broadcasting regionally without assenting to the entire policy.

The Game was not televised in 1955, superseded by the annual match up between UCLA and USC.

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.