What it has done is generate a little more conversation. Here is a Tweet/retweet featuring former Dartmouth center Evan Hecimovich setting the record straight:
We won the Ivy League the past two seasons, and our last game was the day after finals. We practiced and played during finals. We would be off until January and have no school the entirety of playoffs u til the championship. It’s a pathetic excuse
— Evan Hecimovich (@evanhecimovich) March 27, 2022
Kudos to Hecimovich for speaking up.
Green Alert Take: I'm not a huge fan of reading my own drivel and reposting it here, but today I'll make an exception. This has appeared previously on BGA Daily and the story above as well as the subsequent exchange are why I'm putting it up again. So here goes . . .
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Working on an essay for the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia some years back, I asked some very important people to please explain the ban on postseason play for Ivy League football teams. The answer I got most frequently was the telephone equivalent of a blank stare. In the end I got two unsatisfactory explanations. One was along the lines of, "That's the way it's always been."
The other?
Ivy League rules prohibit it.
Let me see if I can simplify the second explanation for you. It's against the rules because the Ivy League rules prohibit it.
As silly as that is, it seems that might be wrong.
A good friend of BGA who has been doing some digging found a copy of the Ivy Manual online. Flip ahead to page 159 where the text of the Presidents Agreement of 1954 starts and read away. When you get to page 161 you'll find this:
The members of the Group shall not engage in post season games or any other contests designed to settle sectional or other championships. (NOTE: National Collegiate Athletic Association, Eastern College Athletic Conference, A.A.U competitions and international competitions such as the games, meets and matches with Oxford and Cambridge Universities shall not be considered as post-season games or contests within the meaning of the above rule.)
Here's what it says to me: Postseason bowl games to determine a "mythical national championship" (Rose Bowl, etc.) are prohibited.
Postseason games to determine an NCAA championship are not prohibited.
If that's the case, Ivy League teams should be allowed by rule to appear in the NCAA FCS football playoffs, and allowing every last Ivy League sport except football to go on is indefensible.
BGA Take: As a lawyer friend explained, there's enough ambiguity in the Presidents Agreement to allow the Presidents to weasel out of football participation in NCAA playoffs. Of course, the rules in the Agreement are hardly written in stone. Here are several that have been rewritten over the years, with my thoughts in italics:
• Football schedules shall not be made more than two years in advance of the current calendar year. (In 2015 Dartmouth announced football schedules through 2020 with a 2022 game included.)
• No football practice shall take place at any time except during the fall season (What was it I covered for 12 practices in the spring?)
• No student shall be eligible for a varsity team until he has completed satisfactorily an academic year's work at the institution he is to represent. (There are now freshmen who play in a game before ever sitting in on a class.)
• Football practice for all institutions in the Group shall start not earlier than a date to be agreed upon each year by the Administrative Committee, which may not be earlier than September 1 in any year. (Practice for all schools begins in August.)
• The coaches and players of institutions in the Group shall not participate in clinics for secondary school coaches or players (Football camps are held on campus.)
Thoughts?
Here's mine: In summers when I was a kid we had to sit on the beach for an hour after eating lunch, watching the clock and begging to go back in the water. The belief in those days was if we went right back in the water after in eating we might get a cramp and drown. That, of course, ended up being hogwash. I've thought ever since that my mother actually owed me about a year worth of swimming. Well, I think the Ivy League owes every football player who won a championship since the start of the NCAA playoffs in 1978 a chance they'll never get and that's too bad. The time has come to let Ivy League football teams test the water just like every other Ivy League team.
Nota bene: The link to the original Ivy League agreement online no longer works. Seems a little suspicious to me.
2022 Green Alert Take: If they spend any time thinking it over the Ivy League presidents have to know, in their heart of hearts, that while there were justifiable reasons for the postseason ban when the Ivy League agreement was written, this is a different time and those reasons are no longer valid. This is only my opinion, but I believe the biggest reason why the Ivy League presidents haven’t shown the courage to do the right thing is concern about their image and being known as the group that saw the Ivy League roll back its ban on the postseason on its watch. The presidents would do well to finally show some backbone and allow football players the same privilege every other Ivy League athlete competing in NCAA sports is allowed.
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For those keeping score, it was 11 degrees and the ground was snow-covered when I walked Griff the Wonder Dog this a.m.
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EXTRA POINT
You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law, the Peter Principle and maybe Parkinson’s Law (Google it if you need to). Today I offer you Wood’s Law and it is simply this:
No matter how right the decision was, when you change jobs there will come a time when you are absolutely certain you have made a huge mistake. That feeling will go away.
