A FRONT ROW VIEW: Academic excellence must come before athletics

The Ivy League wet its toes by permitting freshman eligibility for football last fall. But why stop there, right? Let's plunge into the pool of money, fame and excitement of "big time" college athletics. Let's have postseason play for football and athletic scholarships for basketball. Let's not become like Duke, let's beat Duke. We could become the best. However, in the rush to become the biggest and the baddest, we are losing sight of the reasons we chose Penn as our university, and the special character of the Ivy League. Most of us selected Penn because of academics, not due to the success of our beloved basketball team. Our Quaker hoopsters and football players are almost embarrassingly good for an Ivy League institution. But hey, we'll never crack the Top 25, be shown on ESPN2 at midnight or be "appreciated" by the media by whipping the likes of only Cornell and Brown. Yes, all these things would be nice, but the costs of achieving these goals cannot be justified. It comes down to the fundamental question of what is more important: academics or "big time" athletics. The Ivy League has wisely avoided the push to get bigger by disallowing its football team to participate in postseason play. Postseason play for football would put the Ivy League in the absurd position of potentially playing more football games than Division I-A schools. The Ivy League is supposed to be the epitome of the student-athlete. Crazy as it seems, the students who play football may want additional time for their studies. After these four years of bliss, the football players will be competing in the same job market as the rest of us. How many players coming out of Penn have made it in the NFL? Although there have been a few in recent decades, still, bigger is not necessarily better. Some say schools like Duke and Georgetown are able to combine Ivy League-caliber academics with top-flight basketball programs. They argue that student fans have more fun. Unfortunately, Duke games seem to me like semi-pro competitions with manufactured college "rah, rah" spirit thrown in because it looks good on television. With millions of dollars at stake in television revenue for the university and sneaker contracts for the coaches, these contests are anything but amateur. It is important to keep the romanticism of the Ivy League intact -- real student-athletes playing amateur games. The players are not compelled to play basketball because the coach can remove their scholarship. They dream of playing in the NCAA Tournament is an end, not a stepping stone for the professional ranks. Part of the reason rooting for Penn is so much fun is that the team does not feel like a minor league for the NBA. If you are bored by not seeing a dunk every 10 seconds in an Ivy League game, visit the 76ers (well, maybe not the Sixers, but you get the point). I hear they have plenty of good seats available. Finally, I find it more thrilling to be the underdog, the potential Cinderella team in the tournament, than be expected to reach the Sweet 16 every year. People still talk about Princeton's one-point loss to Georgetown with awe. If the Ivy League joins the crowd and becomes a scholarship league, we will lose the unique quality of the Ancient Eight. Penn has raised its basketball ticket prices this season to such a ridiculous level that good seats have become unaffordable to much of the student population -- a predictable consequence of becoming "bigger and better." Hopefully, the advocates of becoming bigger will not succeed; otherwise our football and basketball teams may begin to feel too big for their biggest fans -- the students. Michael Hasday is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y., and a sports writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian.