The league gets chills when its men's hoops champion gets the automatic berth to the NCAA tournament. Princeton's men's hockey team made it to the NCAA tournament this season. Over ten years ago, Princeton's women's softball team made the College World Series two years in a row (the coach of that team, Cindy Cohen, has to be one of the most unheralded great coaches in Ivy history). Princeton's men's lacrosse team has won six national titles in the past 16 years, and every Ivy League champ in any sport gets to go to the NCAA tournament.
Except football.
Why?
There is no rational, logical explanation. It's sheer hypocrisy, and the kids who play so hard in those games should be able, if their squad wins the title, to go to the NCAA 1-AA post-season tournament.
Case closed.
There is no compelling counter-argument.
For a league that's supposed to school smart people, this is a very dumb rule.
Free Ivy football champions -- let them go to the NCAA tournament.
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Ivy League administrators are not positively predisposed to football or football players. Football requires a fair number of admission slots each year to field a team. They would rather use the admit slots for purely academic superstars (as opposed to a first quintile, "A" grade HS student who only scored in the 92nd percentile on his boards, but is 6'2", 240 lbs. and runs a 4.6 40).
If football games were not such significant weekend events in the fall, the universities might do away with the sport altogether -- that is, since it is roughly cash-flow self sustaining from ticket sales, and, arguably, the weekend events still help overall fundraising for the schools, football can be tolerated.
So, the fact the football is the only Ivy sport not permitted to participate in NCAA postseason play is entirely consistent with the unstated view that senior Ivy adminstrators have toward the sport. I suppose that to the extent that they are unwilling to state out loud what they truly believe about football, there is some hypocrisy there.
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