To The Playoffs

So, it's finals week at Princeton. 

Christmas is next week. The schedule across all eight teams is light. Things are slow in the Ivy League right now, right?

Yeah, no.

TigerBlog has to say that he was not expecting the announcement yesterday of a major change in Ivy League policy. Beginning in 2025, the Ivy football champion will play in the FCS playoffs. 

If you haven't seen the release, you can read it HERE.

This is the first sentence: Following a year-long process initiated by the Ivy League's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), the Ivy League Council of Presidents has approved a proposal to participate in the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) playoffs beginning next season.

Yale's Mason Shipp caught 39 passes 431 yards and two touchdowns, both of which came against Brown, this past season. That's not an All-Ivy League resume, but it is a solid senior season, obviously.

More than that, though, Shipp will be remembered for his role in what is among the top three changes that TigerBlog has witnessed in all his time in the league (along with freshman eligibility in football and the adoption of Ivy League tournaments in most team sports but especially basketball).

"It's a monumental day in the Ivy League and a special day to be an Ivy League student-athlete," said Mason Shipp, a senior football student-athlete at Yale who serves as the Ivy League SAAC chair and penned the proposal. "Thank you to the Presidents for listening and responding to the voices of your students. For the future generations that are fortunate enough to represent the Ivy League in the FCS playoffs, go win us some hardware!"

The vote of the Ivy presidents to adopt the proposal that Shipp put forward reminds TB of another athlete, Curt Flood, a pretty good Major League Baseball player in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, the Major Leagues operated under the Reserve Clause, which meant that the players were obligated to their teams until they were traded or released. 

It was Flood who refused to accept a 1969 trade, leading to a series of legal dominoes that ended with the first free agency four years later. Extra credit goes to those who knew that the first Major League free agent was pitcher Andy Messersmith.

So what does this mean for Ivy football? 

It's certainly a game-changing move. If you go back to 1945, you'll see the first Ivy Group agreement, one that was amended in September 1952. This is from the Daily Princetonian in 1952:

A new Presidents' Agreement governing football has been signed by the Presidents of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale. It revises the original agreement of November 1945 and formulates an association "to be known as the 'Ivy Group.'" Among the points changed is the rule regarding the abolition of spring football practice, football clinics and post-season games.

With that as a background, the Ivy League first contested an official football championship in 1956. The Division I-AA tournament — the forerunner to the FCS tournament — began in 1978, when Florida A&M was the first winner. Either North Dakota State or South Dakota State has won 11 of the last 13 championships, and one of them is guaranteed to be in this year's championship game, since they play Saturday in the semifinals (Montana and South Dakota play in the other). 

There have been two finalists from teams currently in the Patriot League, Lehigh in 1979 and Colgate in 2003. Lehigh was this year's Patriot League representative, and the Mountain Hawks won their first round game against Richmond before falling to Idaho. 

Have there been Ivy League teams since 1978 who would have made strong runs through the tournament? Probably. Were Princeton teams among them? Certainly — especially 2018. 

The Ivy League is still working out all of the tiebreakers to determine who would get its automatic bid in the event of multiple champions. The last two years have seen back-to-back tri-champions; there have been five teams who have won at least a share of the title in the last four years (including Princeton in 2021). 

In other words, it's obviously a league of great balance and competitiveness. Having its champion advance to the NCAA playoffs will make it even more so, with so much to play for each week. You don't want to leave things up to the tiebreakers, right? 

The biggest part of the story to TB, though, goes beyond anything that happens on the football field. It's that the Ivy League allowed its Student Athlete Advisory Committee to initiate a major policy change. 

It's a sign that the league puts on the value of intercollegiate athletics and how they are an important part of the experience — and the education — of those who compete here.

This was extraordinarily good news on so many levels.