Please, before you write that alarmist column bemoaning the coming apocalypse that is Ivy League men’s basketball, please pause, take a deep breath, step away from the ledge, and do some research. Sure, Dartmouth losing 83-32 at Allen Fieldhouse isn’t exactly the kind of publicity you’d want if you were Jeff Orleans or Josie Harper. But as far as extracting any deep meaning from that game, it’s tough to take away much more than the fact that the Big Green’s second team can’t hang with the fifth-ranked team in the country on that team’s home court. Not exactly earth-shattering stuff.
Had the Daily Pennsylvanian’s Matt Meltzer cracked open his Penn media guide, he’d hopefully catch the fact that a pretty good, NCAA Tournament-bound Penn team went into Lawrence and lost to the Jayhawks on that same floor by a not-dissimilar 46 points just seven years ago. And the Quakers actually played their starters in that one.
Meltzer goes on to lament the league’s 26 (now 27) losses, which would be understandable if Ivy teams had played, say, 35 games to date. But with an overall record of 21-27 after a string of early season tournaments and guarantee games at Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East schools, the overall record is fine. And considering that Ivy teams have a combined 128-195 non-conference record for a .396 winning percentage the past three seasons, 21-27 is looking pretty decent. If Meltzer wants to pinpoint problem losses, he’d be better off looking at recent avoidable home losses by Cornell and Harvard to struggling American East programs, and by by Brown and Dartmouth to bottom-tier Patriot League teams.
We see these sorts of columns every year from Ivy sportswriters. And while it’s an improvement over the calls for a postseason Ivy League tournament we used to see, it’s getting old. Yes, it’s fun to imagine an alternate reality where the Ivy League goes head-to-head with the big boys and gets multiple NCAA Tournament bids. But aside from the occasional out-of-nowhere season like 2001-02, the league is going to continue being what it is: a non-scholarship conference that manages to finish ahead of between four and 10 scholarship conferences year in and year out. Almost every season there will be a Top 100 team. Most years there will be a couple of Top 200 teams, and sometimes one or two of them might even be good enough for an NIT bid. As for the rest of the league, it’s a good year when only one of them is in the Bottom 50 nationally. This is the reality of the Ivy League’s men’s basketball situation.
Athletic scholarships aren’t happening. Not now, not at any point in the foreseeable future. Progressive financial aid initiatives like what we’ve seen across the league will help Ivies compete with scholarship schools for the services of kids from lower income families. However, it’s going to remain very tough for a middle class family to justify the cost of an Ivy League education when a perfectly fine school is offering a free ride.
Asking Ivy schools to spend more on men’s basketball ignores a number of issues, chief among them, the fact athletics simply aren’t part of these educational institutions’ raisons d’existence. There are also the Title IX implications. And the fact that it just doesn’t make sense for schools like Dartmouth and Harvard to build bigger facilities when the ones they currently have are either new or recently renovated and don’t have any problem meeting seating demand.
Every year it seems we deal with the alarmist view that Ivy League basketball somehow is backsliding nationally. And every year we have to point out that things were much, much worse in the 1980s and not nearly as rosy as everyone seems to think they were in the 1990s. There’s no downward trend, no languishing, festering, or any other negative gerund you can come up with. Perhaps people eventually will learn to stop worrying and love Ivy hoops for what it is: a collection of non-scholarship schools doing much better than it probably should in a scholarship sport. In the meantime, we can do without the Chicken Little routine.
