“As noted, individual presidents give different weights to the various specific issues you identify (e.g., participation in championships in other sports, possible academic effects for players on competing teams, the nature of the I-AA playoffs),” Orleans wrote in an e-mail. “The presidents review this issue periodically, and in trying to find the right balance they are aware of, and consider, the views of administrators, coaches and athletes. While each Ivy president approaches this topic from his or her own personal and institutional perspective, there is at this time a clear consensus about Ivy teams not participating in the playoffs.”

Thank you, Jeff.

And so, I was still left searching. If I understand the statement, it reads: ‘we know why there should be playoffs, but we think there shouldn’t be.’

Undaunted, I went out in search of any “personal and institutional perspectives” that I could find from Ivy presidents in order to shed some light on their decision making processes.

Four years ago, former Brown President Gordon Gee told the Brown Daily Herald that he felt the rule would be changed. In fact, Gee went on to say that he thought the ban would be overturned soon as a matter of equality. His only reservation was that a sport like football, which has a roster of over 70 people, would have a much greater academic impact on its student athletes than any other sport.

That would be strong argument if it were true. Football teams miss approximately five school days per year, leaving one day early for away games. That’s it. And that’s only the pared down traveling squad.

Compare that to the Crimson men’s hockey team, composed of over 25 players, which will play 30 games, many of which occur on the road during the week. No one’s telling them to cut their schedule. No one’s telling them that the ECAC and NCAA Tournaments don’t matter. Well, at least not yet.

Since the presidents’ public statements contain little in the way of a reason for their verdict, I think it’s worthwhile to speculate about what the true causes are.

Maybe the presidents don’t agree with the way mainstream college sports in this country are run. Maybe they dream of the day when Ivy football teams are even further removed from mainstream Division I football, playing only a seven game schedule against their fellow Ivy schools. Maybe they couldn’t care less what the athletic directors, coaches and players think or want. Maybe they ultimately seek to make winning of minimal importance. Maybe they don’t care that they treat our football players unequally.

Just for a second, let’s try to see the argument from the presidents’ perspective. Their actions at this year’s Ivy Council of Presidents’ meeting seem to show that they’re not too fond of recruiting football players. That’s why they chose to increase the minimum Academic Index requirement—2/3 based on SAT scores and 1/3 based on class rank—that players need in order to be considered for acceptance. They also reduced the number of football players that can be recruited per year. The Harvard College admissions website says, “There is no formula for gaining admission to Harvard,” but that seems to only apply if you’re not a football player.

Now, imagine for a moment if we sent a team to the playoffs and they won. Then, the presidents would feel pressure from alumni to keep fielding title contending football teams. Football players would become the spotlight figures on campus, and the Ivy League educational experience would fall apart. (It has to look this grim to the presidents or else they would have caved in to logic a long time ago). But if they can keep Pandora’s box shut, they can continue to diminish the presence of football players on campus and achieve greater diversity by phasing out athletes.

Despite the presidents’ strong desire to keep Ivy League football sheltered from the national stage, the conference has begun to flourish. This year, Ivy League football has had more than ten games televised either regionally or nationally. In fact, this year’s Harvard-Yale game will be carried by the national cable channel WGN out of Chicago. This television explosion is the culmination of a trend which has led Ivy League football back to national prominence. And the quality of play has risen too. In the last few years Harvard and Penn have spent time in the national rankings. Penn is currently eighth in the Sports Network national poll.

If this trend continues, we could see an Ivy League team ranked in the top five of the national polls in the not too distant future. If that team were unable to compete in the I-AA tournament, all hell would break loose. There would always be an asterisk by that year’s title, as everyone would be left to wonder if the Ivy powerhouse could have beaten the eventual champion. The other I-AA institutions would loudly criticize the Ivy League’s postseason ban as out-of-date and elitist. The NCAA would have a mess on its hands. But our eight fearless leaders would be happy, because they kept our coaches and players at home where they could be easily accessible to reporters asking how it feels not to compete, instead of actually allowing the players to go out and prove their abilities.

Not only is it ridiculous to preserve this system in its present state, it’s also not fair. The Ivies are the only league in all of Division I football that limits a team’s accomplishment to a conference title. The Ivy League schedules games against I-AA powerhouses Villanova, Lehigh, and Northeastern. I wonder what’s more agonizing—winning or losing. If you lose, you feel the pain of knowing you don’t belong. If you win, it’s the pain of knowing you do.

Beyond the players, it’s not fair to the fans. To a lot of us college football is life. We’ve followed our favorite teams for years. We’ve seen the screaming fans in the stadium, with their faces painted and their chests marked, holding that sole index finger in the air—the universal sign of being No. 1. But at Harvard, in the Ivy League, something’s missing. We show up from time to time to hallowed Harvard Stadium, encouraging our team with raised voice, cautiously applying our facial paint, and putting that big H on our New England induced pale-white torsos. But we never wave our index fingers in the air. Because we know that eight stubborn administrators will never give us the chance to truly back it up.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.