“You could see an at-large happen, for sure,” he said. “It’s not like these teams are going to play in the playoffs and get rolled over. It’s going to be competitive.”

ON THE PLUS SIDE

The possibility also exists that playoff participation could provide benefits to the conference that it does not currently receive, with one potential area of growth being recruiting.

Both Murphy and Estes, two of the three coaches to win an Ancient Eight championship in the last seven years—the other, Penn’s Al Bagnoli, declined to comment for this story—say that they do not believe that the conference’s ban on postseason play has a major impact on the talent they are able to attract.

“With the type of kids the Ivy League recruits it’s such a small part of their decision-making process, and they seem to see the big picture,” Murphy said. “It doesn’t seem to be a huge issue whatsoever.”

“I’ve never encountered an athlete that decided not to come to Brown because we don’t play in the playoffs, as far as I know,” Estes echoed. “We just don’t talk about it. There’s certainly enough interest [because players] understand the value of the education...the chance to be an Ivy League champion is what we talk about.”

But Scales, who led the Ivy League in rushing this year, disagrees.

“To say that that [the playoff ban] doesn’t come into play in some people’s decisions would be ludicrous,” the running back said. “Everybody wants to be able to measure themselves against the rest of the nation, and everybody wants to be able to play against folks from their hometown or have their family and friends from nearby come see them. It can impact recruiting in some way.”

Because a sustained playoff run would increase the exposure and reputability of any program, Cobb says that tournament participation could benefit recruiting by attracting more attention around the country to the conference itself.

“What it gets back to is the experience of playing different teams in different places,” Cobb said. “I think that’s the piece that probably the Ivies are missing and the Division I playoffs [are] missing [without the Ivies].”

Currently, each Ancient Eight squad plays three non-conference games per year—contests that are largely meaningless to the teams’ ultimate goal of winning an Ivy League title because they cannot advance beyond their respective 10-game schedules. The Quakers, for example, won a league championship last season despite going 0-3 in non-conference play.

“Certainly the talent’s there, and you can make the argument that the Ivy League can play with some of the big boys in FCS football,” McDonnell said. “But until that happens, there will also be the question of what the Ivy League is actually competing for.”

Another benefit of playoff participation is that it would make those three non-conference games more significant because they would impact potential playoff seeding and at-large bids. But Murphy says those non-conference games are just as meaningful to his team as the league ones are.

“When you work probably 300 days a year in some facet preparing for those 10 games, there’s no question that they’re [all] very important,” Murphy said. “I don’t sense any different type of preparation or motivation to win those [non-conference] games.”

And while Cobb says the ability to put an additional game in the Northeastern market of the Ivy League is appealing to the subdivision, Harris says that partaking in the tournament would be “cost-neutral” for the conference itself.