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Subject: It's Morning in The Ivy League Author: An Observer [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] Date Posted: 13:05:13 12/04/25 Thu In reply to: Boola Boola 's message, "Yale vs Montana State - Saturday 2:00 PM" on 08:59:18 12/04/25 Thu I've said on this board for years that Ivy League football needs two things and does not need two other things. What we do not need: athletic scholarships and an eleventh game. What we do need: FCS playoff participation and an earlier start to the season, preferably the Saturday after Labor Day. FCS playoff participation will pay tremendous dividends. We are a competitive conference and our champion will, in some years, make noise. The best of our champions is a threat to go all the way. Over the last two decades, I think that three-to-five of our best were candidates to make it to the Final Four. Not coincidentally, FCS playoff participation may lead to an earlier start to the season. Our coaches now realize that we need to schedule up in out-of-conference games to improve our playoff seeding. In this case, scheduling up does not mean just dropping Stetson and Merrimack. It means one or two games per season per Ivy title contender against the Mercer's and Villanova's of the world, on our way to scheduling against the Dakotas and Montanas. The only time that the latter are willing to play us is earlier in September. This may take some time, but it's the logical step, a season start two weeks earlier. Last Saturday when Yale and Harvard were trailing at halftime by 56 points cumulatively, it didn't look great. But then it all turned around. Bigly. We're playing with house money now. I'm optimistic. Let's go. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

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[> [> Subject: I agree with Stetson, but... Author: Go Green [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 15:24:54 12/04/25 Thu You could have listed a number of other teams before Merrimack. They probably would have finished in the middle of the Patriot League.

[> [> [> Subject: Re: I agree with Stetson, but... Author: An Observer [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 10:15:32 12/05/25 Fri You are correct. There are better examples than Merrimack. I think I just had a kneejerk reaction from when I first found out a few years ago that Harvard men's basketball was going to play Merrimack. My first thought was, "As in the Monitor?" I like to maintain the self-congratulatory delusion that there are very few NCAA colleges (as opposed to NAIA) I have never heard of. I was struck that the most famous university in the world by far was going to play a varsity basketball competition against a school which was completely new to me. And I lived in Boston for more than a decade, about half an hour from Merrimack. One of the greatest women I ever dated, on our first date told me that she had graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. Then she added, "We're national champions." I asked, "In what?" She responded, "In football." I literally thought that she might be crazy. Well, as the hours passed on our that fateful first date, it became clear that, not only was she sane, she was one of the smartest, clearest thinking, and most capable people I had ever met. Later I looked up Pacific Lutheran. Sure enough, they were the reigning NAIA Division II national champions in football. There are more schools you've never heard of than you might think.