If you're looking for something to do Nov. 19, you might consider stopping by Franklin Field. The Penn football team will be playing Cornell in the final game of the season. It's always the final game of the season against Cornell.
Penn might be 9-0 and ranked in the top-10 nationally when the Big Red comes to town. But it will still be the last game of the season.
Because the University is in the Ivy League -- the only conference in America where arcane rules are passed off with a straight face as traditions -- the football team is banned from competing in the NCAA Tournament. Each fall, 16 of the top teams in Division I-AA square off in an exciting three-week buildup to the national championship.
Since the inception of that playoff format in the 1970s, no Ivy League teams has been one of those 16. Nor has any team in the Ancient Eight been able to play any sort of postseason game since the league was founded as a football conference in the 1950s.
This all might make some sense if applied to all Ivy League sports. Instead the ban singles out football, while allowing basketball, soccer and dozens of other sports to advance to postseason tournaments.
Ivy League fans across the country just want some justification of this discriminatory policy -- no other league administrator has provided one worth the paper it was printed on.
And after more than a year as Penn's president, Amy Gutmann still has not weighed in publically on the issue. Previous Penn administrators have. So have presidents from other Ivy League schools such as Yale's Richard Levin. Gutmann, however, has deferred to the league's Executive Director Jeff Orleans.
The same Jeff Orleans that advances such fallacy as "the presidents see it not as football being different but the Ivy League being continuous since the 1950s."
If these people think that football at these schools hasn't changed since the 1950s, they are in serious need of a reality check. Back then, Ivy League football was respected. Back then tens of thousands of fans sold-out Franklin Field. Back then Sports Illustrated put Yale's mascot, Handsome Dan, on its cover.
Today, the rest of the country couldn't care less about the Ancient Eight.
It seems as though the presidents don't mind. Winning the Ivy League, they say, is by far the greatest accomplishment a team can have. Never mind that in the past two years Harvard and Penn have each completed an undefeated season, and finished in the top-15 only to sit at home while lesser teams participated in the playoffs.
The worst part is, almost every constituency involved -- the coaches, the players, the athletic directors, the students and the fans -- support lifting the postseason ban. Everyone, except the seven other Ivy League presidents and Amy Gutmann, who hasn't taken a stand either way.
Gutmann has only one vote at the Ivy Group, and change would not be easy. But it would mean a great deal to the Penn community if she were to stand up for its student athletes and oppose this senseless ban.
What good is excellence within just the Ivy League, when eminence as a top-flight national program is possible?
