Ivy Playoff Potentials

I spoke with Ivy League Director Robin Harris Monday afternoon about the possibility of an Ivy playoff game. Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, plans must be in place for such an event. Lucky for Harris and her staff, they've done this before. And while they could not secure TV network slots (the game was streamed on ESPN3 but they bumped the end to the TV), Harris hasn't discounted that possibility this year. Of course, the turnaround time is pretty quick.

However, she maintained that last year's playoff game "had tremendous numbers for an online streaming event," and said she would be "thrilled … if we could have a scenario like that again." (Harris also said she did not have numbers of this Saturday's ESPN3 viewership to make a comparison.)

At this point in the game, here's what Harris had to say:

On where the Ivy League is in the planning process:

We started discussions internally, in a real sense, about probably a week or two ago. Last week, started getting more specific with our options, and then obviously given the events of the past weekend and the fact that we now have a tie for first place with Harvard and Penn, and Yale’s still in the picture, we’ve engaged in more serious conversations about different scenarios and options of where the game would be played, when it would be played, we started reaching out to different television entities to see what television windows are available.

On balancing between setting up plans and knowing they may never come to fruition:

It’s like putting a puzzle together, we’re laying out different options and just knowing, ‘Ok, if we have this scenario, these are our options,’ and we’ll be ready to make a quick decision once we know. If we have scenario B, these are our options, and again we’ll make a quick decision once we know what we’re doing. So it’s all about putting the pieces of the puzzle together, but we don’t know which puzzle we’re going to have yet, right. So by the end of the day on March 6 at the latest, we’re going to know whether we have a playoff, and if so how many teams are involved. And at that point we’re going to be ready to go to implement the plan. We’ll know which puzzle it is, and we’ll be ready to go.

On venue size possibilities, given that the Penn-Harvard games drew such large crowds and so much attention:

We need to know what options are available, we need to reach out to different venues to see, is the venue even available? And same thing with television entities, we want to look into that. We’re not going to be able to commit to anyone until possibly as late as the after the Penn-Princeton game on March 6. So television windows are going to understandably be limited, because most networks are going to have committed their time slots.

We’re considering a lot of different options, and we want to provide the best opportunity for our student-athletes and our fans, and we also want to feature Ivy League venues if we can. So we’re just balancing everything- looking at larger venues to smaller venues, Ivy League venues, venues we’d need to consider geographic proximity. We want to make sure and pick something in the middle.

On whether she is leaning toward NYC/New Haven:

Sure … though I think we’re exploring all of the options. We’re looking in the- but we also don’t know if Yale is in the mix, that shifts it a little bit too. So we have to again, look at a lot of different options. It’s a lot of preparation time and the good thing is, we did it last year. And we have the same staff members involved, and we did the same exercise last year. When we knew we might have a playoff, we went through the options beforehand so when we knew in fact we did have a playoff, we were ready to go and made a very quick decision the very next day as to when we were going to have the game and when it was going to be.