A blessing in disguise?

Say what you will about the time of the Harvard-Brown game being changed to fit the Jewish holidays. I think the end result, a Saturday game, is a much better deal anyway.

I'm not convinced that Friday night football games would be very good for attendance. A lot of alumni (and would-be customers) are probably working on Fridays, possibly making a 6 or 7 p.m. start a tight squeeze for them.

The Friday games do a lot worse than the Saturday ones in basketball. Over the 12 Ivy weekends that Penn played during the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons, Saturday games outdrew Friday ones by an average of about 600 people. The only time a Friday game could outdraw its next-day counterpart was if Dartmouth or Brown were involved. Otherwise, the Saturday game was better-attended, usually by 25% or more.

That's far from a conclusive analysis, but I would bet there's a lot of overlap between hoops fans and football ones. If they were interested in maximizing attendance (not a given, I suppose) Harvard and Brown probably stumbled into a good decision.