Author:
Bengal
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Date Posted: 12:59:55 05/13/24 Mon
You triggered warm thoughts of Don Dobes. Dobes has had a great career as a college football assistant coach. He was a very well regarded LB coach for a number of years at Princeton. I only knew him well enough to exchange greetings. When Surace came in, Verbit was already there and he brought in Jared Backus on the defensive side who eventually moved on to Cornell. So however that dynamic impacted Dobes, he moved on to be DC's defensive coordinator where he has done a great job. Your experience and his success are no surprise.
A couple of posters have commented about the lack of Ivy playoff eligibility singling out football in a way consistent with my own sense, based on Ivy coaches/administrators public comments in the past, a bit of public reporting, and my own conversations: the Ivy presidents are relying on history and precedent, not logic and reason.
The Ivy League was formed largely to put football in its "proper" perspective on our campuses. As several noted, even granting that the pre-Ivy era was a world apart, Ivy teams were sometimes national powerhouses. Kazmier could win the Heisman in 1951. Football, long deemed the flagship sport at our schools by the 1950s, came to take on, I think, heavy symbolic
significance. For some decades, most Ivy Presidents seem to view the sport through that rear view prism, even as numerous other men and then women's teams have gained national post-season success.
Its more than 15 years ago, but at what might have been the last time the Presidents looked at this, they stuck with history and precedent -- and then spent more time in their meeting on figuring out how to explain/justify the decision than they spent on the decision itself. They also made it clear they did not want to deal with football playoffs again anytime soon. I don't know if it has been revisited since.
I am guessing that with what I believe has been greater attention to football injuries since then, that concern also hurt the idea of extending football into playoffs. Maybe as Fear notes, the very long time playoffs could play out is another negative to the Presidents. Although hockey and basketball last as long, albeit without as much of a break between regular and post-season. Keep in mind, over the years, not necessarily at every school, but at any point there have probably been at least a few Presidents either clueless about or just not interested in football
I cannot imagine the Ivy Presidents turning to this issue anytime soon with so many other difficult matters on their plate -- 3 of them resigning within months of each other and who knows if there might not be a fourth soon. Personally, while I favor playoff elgibility, I have moved on. Ivy Football, IMO, faces two much larger issues: The continual pecking away at recruit class sizes which are not only a bad thing in the present but are a terrible precedent for further erosion; the impact of NIL as well as the removal of the one-year bar for playing after a transfer, which affects more than football as our basketball programs, as one example, have shown.
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