.45 CALEBER: Tourney Would Be Best for League

Last Thursday in New York, the athletic directors of the Ancient Eight took a small step towards loosening the chokehold that has strangled Ivy League basketball for the past 50 years.

In a regularly scheduled meeting, the directors listened to the presentation of a subcommittee of Ivy administrators formed to investigate the feasibility of a postseason league tournament, which would determine who received the league’s automatic berth in the NCAA tournament.

“It is clearly the first time that the movement [for a postseason tournament] has come from the directors as opposed to the grassroots efforts, the coaches. So I thought it was a positive step,” said Harvard coach Frank Sullivan, who chaired a coaches committee formed 12 years ago to investigate the issue, a movement ultimately shot down by opposition from Penn and Princeton. Of the 31 Division I basketball conferences, the Ivy League is the only one without a postseason tournament, and thus the only one to determine its winner based upon the regular season.

Penn and Princeton have dominated the league since its formal inception in 1955-56, and the last time a non-P won the league outright was Cornell in 1988. Either the Quakers or Tigers have gained a share of the league title, and captured the berth in the NCAA tournament, in 42 of the past 44 seasons.

The simple reason for this is that they have had the best programs, and the best athletes, and over the course of the grueling 14 game league schedule of back-to-back Friday-Saturday games, that quality wins out. A conference tournament would allow an upstart team, or one playing particularly well at season’s end, to score an upset that would allow them to reach the promised land, the NCAA tournament, where Harvard has not been since 1946. The Crimson, incidentally, has never won an Ivy League title.

In general, it appears that the vast majority of league and team personnel are in favor of a postseason tournament. The sole exception might be the Penn officials—Quakers athletic director Steve Bilsky was quoted in last Friday’s New York Times as stating that the regular season is the fairest determinant of who gets to go to the dance. Penn, of course, has no reason to support a tournament, considering that their talent level is higher than the rest of the league’s, even Princeton’s. The Tigers, who have struggled to maintain their outstanding tradition in the last several years, are beginning to experience difficulty in attracting the quality of athlete they have had in years past, leading to a potential loosening in their opposition to a tournament.

While it remains unclear exactly what was decided in last Thursday’s meeting, and whether or not the subcommittee, chaired by Yale athletic director Thomas Beckett, will move forward with efforts to initiate a tournament, what is certain is that any potential change is still far off on the horizon. Getting the approval of the league’s athletic directors would be just the starting point of an arduous process that would ultimately end up with the eight Ivy presidents—and as one might recall from past musings on the lack of Ivy League inclusion in the Division I-AA football playoffs, the Ivy presidents are not a group receptive to rapid change in athletics. A potential stumbling block might be that extra games would result in a loss of additional class time for the league’s student-athletes.

However, the fact that the issue has gotten this far is noteworthy.

“There’s certainly more dialogue about it that than there ever has been, which is good,” Sullivan said. “Through the years it’s been dismissed, and dismissed quickly. This is the first time that we’re getting the feeling that people do want to talk about it.”

It is worth asking, however, whether an Ivy postseason tournament would be a good thing. The purest, most fair way of determining the league winner is to see who plays the best throughout the season, as Bilski correctly points out. If Penn or Princeton wins the league, only to be knocked out in a first round upset in the conference tournament, it is highly unlikely that their Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) score would be strong enough to get them an at-large berth in the NCAAs.

The pros of the postseason tournament, however, outweigh the cons for one simple reason: the current state of affairs in the Ivy League is one of extreme stagnation. A postseason tournament, even if it only included the top four teams, would give teams at the bottom of the standings an incentive to fight for that crucial last playoff spot, rather than to play out the string in meaningless games. As it stands now, every year is the same, with Princeton or Penn coming out on top, and every year a multitude of pointless games are played down the stretch between the non-P’s in front of empty arenas on campuses full of students apathetic with regards to the state of Ivy basketball.

In short, Ancient Eight basketball is slowly dying. Harvard coach Frank Sullivan, who in his 16th season at the school is currently the longest tenured coach in the Ivy League and the longest tenured in the Crimson’s history, has stated that the talent base of the league in general is no longer what it was, and Ivy teams have been beaten soundly in their recent forays into the NCAA tournament. This lessening in overall talent could conceivably lead to a lessening in the gap between the top and bottom teams, but that parity has to this point not appreciably weakened the power of the dual league juggernauts. Attendance is also a major issue—so far this year, five Ivy teams are drawing well less than 1,000 fans per game, with Columbia clocking in with a dismal average of 349 spectators.

“All of us are wrestling with attendance issues, at every school in our league, and [a postseason tournament] to me would be great for student athlete welfare, wonderful for the student body at those schools,” Sullivan said. “They’d like to see meaningful exciting games that have some merit [at season’s end]. It’s a great way to create excitement, great way to create interest, and it’s what our student athletes want.”

The league badly needs an infusion of energy, and the best solution is a postseason tournament. Ultimately, what the players want should be the deciding factor, and it is evident that the players want badly to experience the excitement that a tournament would bring.

“It would be a great thing because, the way it’s set up now, if you have a string of a few rough games, season’s over,” senior center Brian Cusworth said. “If you get into the bottom of the rankings, you have no chance to get it back. Every other team in the country gets the chance to finally prove themselves at the end of the year. That’s what March Madness is all about.”

Perhaps, with last Thursday’s meeting as the potential first step, Ivy teams other than Princeton and Penn will someday get to experience that madness.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.