After finishing the 2014 season undefeated for just the third time in a century, the Harvard football team will look to take home another title.

In November 2011, the Harvard football team wrapped up a dominant season with a 45-7 thrashing of rival Yale.

The Crimson, which finished the year ranked No. 14 in the Football Championship Subdivision, went 9-1 overall and undefeated in the Ivy League on the way to winning the conference title.

“We got beat by a better football team today,” former Yale coach Tom Williams said after the contest. “They’re the best team in our league—the best team we’ve played this year—and it showed.”

It was a meaningful statement from Williams, whose squad had also faced the Patriot League’s Lehigh Mountain Hawks in a non-conference contest earlier in the season. In the week following The Game, Lehigh would go on to play in the FCS Tournament, where it reached the quarterfinals and finished the season ranked No. 5 in the nation.

Harvard—in Williams’ mind a better team than Lehigh—never had such a chance.

That’s because the Ancient Eight does not allow its teams to compete in the six-week, 20-team championship playoffs.

Though winners of 11 conferences, including the Patriot League, earn automatic bids to the field, the Ivy League continues to decline a bid. That means that no matter how well an Ancient Eight team plays during the regular season, its year will come to an end a month before that of its elite peers.

The conference is one of just two FCS leagues to opt out of the playoff—the other being the Southwestern Athletic Conference, which instead splits its members into divisions and plays a conference championship game of its own.

As an explanation for this ban on postseason play, Ivy conference administrators cite concerns about both tradition and academics, noting that the playoff—which begins the weekend after Thanksgiving—could interfere with reading period and finals.

Denied the opportunity to test themselves against the nation’s best FCS squads, teams like the 2004 Crimson—which finished the regular season as the nation’s only undefeated FCS team and was ranked No. 13 in the country at year’s end—must be content with only winning an Ivy League championship.

Though some support this ban and share the belief that the football season should conclude before the start of reading period, others point to the spring NCAA tournaments for golf, softball, tennis, and lacrosse—all of which feature the participation of the Ancient Eight champion (and sometimes multiple Ivy teams), despite the fact that they can and often do extend into the heart of finals.

The Ivy League’s continued rejection of postseason play for football, on the other hand, has left many players, coaches, and fans disappointed about the missed opportunity for the best of the Ivy League to test itself on the gridiron against the nation’s elite in a quest to win a national championship.

AN INFLEXIBLE POSITION

Though the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) has continued to use the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) computer system to determine the participants in its national championship game—a setup that will change when it implements a four-team playoff in 2014—the FCS has used a tournament model since the inception of Division I-AA football in 1978.

That year, the playoff included just four teams; the tournament then expanded to eight squads in 1981, 12 in 1982, 16 in 1986, and 20 in 2010.