Things have never been simple in the Ivy League.

There hasn't been an outright Ancient Eight football champion since 1980. Moreover, no titlist has gone undefeated in league play since Dartmouth went 7-0 in 1970, when the Big Green actually finished 17th in the nation.

And now, in the fifth week of the 1984 campaign, no less than five teams have a legitimate shot at wearing the Ivy crown.

Smith Barney

Harvard, of course, can make life easy on itself by winning the championship the old-fashioned way: by earning it. If the Cantabs are victorious in each of the next three games, they'll waltz into their first outright league title since 1975.

But it'll be a long and difficult road for the Cambridge eleven. Harvard, now 4-0 in league play, faces a significantly more difficult schedule than Penn and Brown, the other two teams with a reasonable shot at the crown.

The three teams that remain on the Harvard slate--Brown, Penn and Yale--sport a combined Ivy record of 9-3, with none of those opponents below, 500 overall.

Penn's schedule is less rigorous, as the Quakers take on 2-2 Princeton this weekend and then face 1-3 Cornell in the season finale. Putting Harvard in the middle of that schedule makes the combined Ivy record of Penn's remaining opponents 7-5.

But the big winner in the schedule sweepstakes is Brown. Although the Bruins are currently a game behind league-leading Harvard and Penn, they'll face what should be their only remaining challenge of the year when they square off against the Crimson Saturday in the Stadium.

After that, Brown will only have to outscore winless Dartmouth and Columbia--a task Ivy League teams have found none too difficult this year--to finish with a possible tie for the Ivy championship.

In fact, the combined Ivy record of Brown's three remaining opponents is just 4-8.

Yet, Harvard will have one key advantage over both Penn and Brown in the race to the promised land of league supremacy: the Crimson plays two of its remaining three games at home, while both the Bruins and the Quakers will spend two of the next three Saturdays on enemy turf.

There's a catch, however, Harvard's away game is at Penn.

Poor Richard

Franklin Field, where the Cantabs will face Pennsylvania, will be the gathering place for approximately 40,000 Harvard-hating Quaker fans. And memories are still fresh of the controversial 1982 Harvard-Penn game, in which a disputed last-second Quaker field goal handed Harvard its first loss of the Ivy season and set the stage for the two teams to tie for the league crown.

So Harvard has its work cut out for it in a traditionally wide-open Ivy race. At this point even Princeton or Yale could theoretically grab a piece of the title, and as many as four teams could share the championship.

With five teams still mathematically eligible for Ivy laurels, the only thing that's for certain is that nothing is for certain.

But in the Ivy League, that's tradition.