COLUMN: Give football a shot to win national title

From Eric Goldstein's "Upon Further Review," Fall '95 I watched the Virginia-Tech-Miami, Notre Dame-Texas and Colorado-Texas A&M; results scroll across my set (you know, real football). I waited and waited through two, three, four commercial breaks until the Game of the Week (at least in my eyes) popped up. Final score: Penn 28, Lafayette 8. I ran down the hall and announced the result to my father. "Phfft, Lafayette," he laughed. That is probably the response that most of the country had upon seeing the Penn result flash on their TV sets. And it would probably have been my reaction if not for one thing -- The Streak. Not just a streak, but The Streak. With Penn riding a 23-game winning streak, every game, even against mediocre non-conference teams, has become newsworthy. But if Penn loses this Saturday to Bucknell (just pretend), will Quakers fans really care about the Colgate game next year? When it comes right down to it, Penn's top goal is an Ivy League championship. And the last I checked, Colgate was not in the Ivy League. All of the hype surrounding The Streak has clouded our senses. As long as the Ivy League prevents its members from competing in postseason play, non-conference games mean absolutely nothing. Ask our Ivy brethren at Cornell if their win over Holy Cross was cause for celebration. And do you think Columbia is all that upset about its loss to St. Mary's? If not for The Streak, would I have been so eager to find out the Penn-Lafayette result? Probably not. The fact is Ivy games are meaningful, non-conference matchups are not. So why do we even bother playing inferior teams from the Patriot League? The answer escapes me at the moment. But the reason the rest of Division I-AA schedules non-conference games is very clear. It's a little thing called the playoffs. Not only do teams like Youngstown State, Marshall, Eastern Kentucky and Boston University go after conference crowns, but they compete after the regular season in a 16-team national-championship playoff. For those schools, it is imperative to play challenging out-of-conference schedules and to impress the voters with wins over other nationally-ranked teams. For an example, pull out a copy of last year's final Division I-AA poll. Penn finished the season ranked only 14th in the nation despite a perfect 9-0 record. Even if the Quakers had been eligible for postseason play as an at-large team, they still might not have been invited, while schools with inferior records (and inferior talent) fought for the national crown. With the top 16 teams getting invites and Penn ranked 14th, the Quakers would have been right on the fence. Why? Penn's biggest wins were against unranked competition like Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell. However, the powers-that-be in the Ancient Eight have decided that Ivy League athletes are incapable of keeping up with their studies with an elongated season. Correction: They have decided football players are incapable of keeping up with their studies with an elongated season. Of course, Ivy League basketball, baseball, lacrosse, field hockey, softball, swimming, squash, crew, track, wrestling, gymnastics and volleyball teams are allowed to compete for national championships. Just not football. The conference seems to have realized that football players are capable of this balance. In the past few years, spring practice has been allowed, and freshmen have been made eligible at the varsity level. The players certainly can handle the added commitment, and if anyone bothered to ask them, they surely would jump at the chance to go to the playoffs. Penn football players continue to win and win, stretching The Streak toward the three-year mark. Youngstown State players have no Streak to brag about, but they do have rings. Ask any Penn player if they'd trade The Streak for a ring, and you'd get a unanimous "yes." Instead, they are left wondering what could have been.