Before the Super Bowl, there was the Yale Bowl. Before Chicago’s Soldier Field, there was Cambridge’s Soldiers’ Field. Before the Bowl Championship Series, there was The Game.

And before there were college athletics, there was college sport.

But as commercial television and intercollegiate football intersected in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the distinction between the two rapidly blurred, resulting in a fissure in the membership of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) which left the loosely-affiliated Ivy Group on the brink of withdrawing from the national body in favor of a small, self-contained conference.

Initially, the internal debate’s dominant voice came from those college administrators nationwide who decried the drop off in attendance that accompanied the nationwide airing of premier match ups each Saturday.

In response, the NCAA formed a 10-member committee to govern coast-to-coast coverage in 1952, which first responded to member schools’ complaints by implementing a game of the week policy which banned all other contests from the airwaves. Schools were limited to one appearance per year, but might be kept off the air altogether at the NCAA’s discretion, as Harvard was in 1952 when the DuMont network’s efforts to air The Game in New York were rejected by the NCAA, since NBC had placed the winning bid for the year’s exclusive broadcast rights.

But this accomplished little in the way of solving the problem. While the exodus from the stadiums to the couches was slowed by the restriction, attendance remained markedly down, even with just one game on television. The dissatisfaction of excluded programs—most vocally expressed by Pennsylvania Athletic Director Francis Murray, who insisted that the limitations be scrapped—mitigated those marginal gains, however.

“The present program has proved a complete failure and, in addition, clearly violates existing anti-trust laws.” Murray told The Crimson in 1952. “I am highly optimistic that it will be thrown out and a new plan substituted.”

Though Murray proposed a three-point revenue-sharing plan of his own to counter the extension of the television monopoly, he quickly fell under attack for his public criticisms of the NCAA policies, even within the Ivy Group, foreshadowing greater conflict to come.

When Yale Athletic Director Robert Hall, the architect of the NCAA plan and Murray’s primary adversary stepped down on May 13, 1953, the Ancient Eight’s relationship with the NCAA rapidly unraveled. Harvard rejected the NCAA television framework two days later and Yale withdrew on May 25.

“Thomas D. Bolles, Director of Athletics, announced last night that Provost Paul H. Buck with the approval of the Harvard Corporation voted against the National Collegiate Association’s football television policy for the 1953 season,” the College’s press release said. “Harvard intends not to be bound by any program restricting its right to decide independently when and to what extent it will televise athletic sports.”

Though both Harvard and Yale made no overtures to independently arrange a network broadcast arrangement, Pennsylvania almost immediately entered into such negotiations, while Princeton privately voted against the NCAA’s national blackout.

The coordinated moves prompted speculation that the Ivy schools might withdraw from the national body altogether despite denials from the colleges.

“We decided not to go along with the NCAA plan because we felt we should be responsible only to ourselves for our own decisions,” said Charles M. O’Hearn, assistant to Yale President A. Whitney Griswold. “We are acting independently on this issue and will do so on all policy issues.”

“We still consider ourselves members in good standing, and are only acting independently on this issue,” he said.

Officially, talk centered on the legality of the NCAA’s measures. The National Football League had pursued a comparable slate for its televised games, only to find itself the subject of a Justice Department anti-trust probe. Similar questions surrounded the NCAA’s monopoly status, and it was those concerns which were cited as the principle underlying the Ivies rejection of the television deal.