After years of pressure and negative editorials, the Council of Ivy Group Presidents has had enough.
The governing body of Ivy League athletic policy announced yesterday that in response to all the critical press in The Daily Pennsylvanian and other Ivy League student newspapers, it would be handing over control of intercollegiate athletics policy to the eight schools' student newspapers.
This means that the papers can decide such things as football postseasons, athletic scholarships and league schedules.
"The Harvard Crimson did such a good job defending me when I was in trouble, I have full confidence that it can defend the institutional principles of the Ivy League," outgoing Harvard president Lawrence Summers said.
Crimson president D.E. William C. Mara IV '07 was not surprised to hear the news.
"We are the best student newspaper in the country, and better than some other 'professional papers' as well," the three-piece-suit-wearing 21-year-old said. "There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to govern the Ivy League -- by the way, Harvard has the most varsity sports of any school in the country -- better than those jerks who used to."
The leaders of the eight papers convened late last night (actually, it was only seven because the editor of The Dartmouth forgot that he actually ran a newspaper) to talk about initial changes.
For one, they decided that the Ivy League would move to Division I-A in football and allow athletic scholarships in all sports.
The first changes have already brought scorn from alumni and the coaching staffs at Duke, Stanford and Northwestern.
"Screw that," said Jeff Muskus, popped-collar wearing, yacht-owning Bush-loving editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News said. "Duke's in a scandal, Northwestern's teams are worse than Brown's, and Stanford's way too far away to do anything serious."
But Brown Daily Herald editor-in-chief Robbie Corey-Boulet was more concerned with the criticism of alumni.
"If they don't pay us anymore, how can we buy pot?" he wondered. "If we have no pot, how can we continue to endure going to school at Brown?"
The new policies have already made ripples through the athletic world, though. Several big-name football and basketball players, like Notre Dame's Brady Quinn (Yale), Texas' Vince Young (Cornell, obviously) and UCLA's Luc-Richard Mbah a Moute and Alfred Aboya (Penn -- keeping the Cameroon connection going with Friedrich Ebede's graduation) have all announced their decisions to transfer the Ivy League.
And they will not even have to sit out next year.
"If [NCAA president] Myles Brand has a problem with that, he can see me," DP Executive Editor Jeff Greenwald said.
"Yeah," Columbia Spectator editor-in-chief Steve Moncada said. "What the DP does, the Spec does."
Cornell Daily Sun editor-in-chief Erica Fink was glowing about the headlines that her sports section ran yesterday.
"'Red to face real foes,' it doesn't get any better than that," she said.
While the nation is still buzzing over the decision and the new policies, Daily Princetonian editor-in-chief Chanakya Sethi predicted less of a major revolution than others.
"You know, in a few weeks, we'll probably just go back to how it was," the snide editor said. "We're just trying to make sure that everyone knows who's in charge. Then we'll put it in cruise control, just like we do with our newspapers."
Penn basketball coach Fran Dunphy is not concerned.
"Even though they cover basketball like it's the only sport at Penn and do muckraking about our recruits, The Daily Pennsylvanian is a very good newspaper and I have a medium amount of respect for it," Dunphy said.
