Of course, you had to have the right TV provider to watch Harvard's last-second victory. You had to have set up an ESPN account with username and password. And you had to have a fast enough Internet connection.
Oh, and unless you had an Internet-ready TV or Chromecast, you were stuck watching it on your computer. Or maybe your iPad. Or worse yet, your phone.
And everything had better work perfectly, which it didn't for me. Yeah, I got to watch on my TV with Chromecast until about three or four minutes were left, when Harvard had built a seven-point lead. Then my feed just plain stopped. The message on the screen was something like, Your program is in a commercial break, or some such thing. I waited. And waited. And waited.
I finally got it working again on my iPod with 30 seconds remaining and lo and behold, the game had been tied up. I wonder how that happened. Then I saw Yale's hearts get broken. Again.
It was great drama, having one game at the end of the season for all the marbles.
Guess what, Ivy League? You could have the same thing EVERY YEAR if you had a tournament, like the rest of the country.
And guess what else? Your final wouldn't be an occasionally freezing broadcast on some laptop screen with a couple of announcers you've never heard of.
If the Ivy League had a tournament the final would be broadcast by one of the real ESPN stations EVERY YEAR and EVERYONE who had ESPN could watch it on their 70-inche flat-screens. How good would that be for the Ivy League? How cool would that be for the players?
I'm thinking a lot of channel surfers stumbled across the Albany-Stony Brook broadcast and stuck around for the buzzer beater and subsequent fan stampede. Wanna guess how many people stumbled across the Ivy League championship game? Yeah, right.
Do you think your local Applebees had the Harvard-Yale game jerry-rigged onto one of their TVs? Me neither.
National TV? Oh please.
The AP quotes Yale coach James Jones on the subject of holding an Ivy League tournament:
"Anybody who came to this game tonight will walk away wanting more. I'm certainly a proponent of it. I think it's great for the league."But of course the Ivy League does it right and the rest of the country does it wrong.
Same deal with football going to the playoffs, of course. Fortunately that idea resonates with new Princeton Athletic Director Mollie Marcoux. From a Princeton Alumni Weekly Q&A with Marcoux:
Football is the only sport in which Ivy teams cannot play in the NCAA playoffs. Would you like to see the league lift the postseason ban?
Ultimately, yes, I’d like to see the kids be able to have a postseason competition. They work so hard during the season that it would be great to have that next opportunity.Just like every other sport the Ivy League plays.
