But I digress.

League insiders’ various suggestions aren’t important here; what is important is that the discussion is being had. Let’s go back to pre-term planning for a second.

PTP and other Harvard inanities make common topics of conversation because Harvard students like to complain and look smart, but the biggest factor is that nearly everyone agrees there is an underlying issue. You would be less likely to criticize PTP at dinner if you thought your friends might throw swai at you for disparaging what they consider to be a perfect tool.

Conversation normally focuses on whether there is a problem, except when everyone agrees that one exists.

I’m not being radical when I put forward the syllogism: a) There must be a consensus problem for conversation to be dominated by discussion of solutions b) The only conversations regarding the Ivy football schedule regard potential changes, and therefore c) The league’s schedule is accepted as flawed.

But it does not have to be. In recent years, the University has altered its academic calendar and tweaked pre-term planning after a groundswell of grumbling from armchair administrators.
In football scheduling, some changes are already coming.

Dartmouth will play New Hampshire for the first time in five years this season. Yale will play Army for the first time since 1996. Princeton will travel to San Diego, leaving its region for the first time in years, and Harvard will play in Washington, D.C., against Georgetown.

With an influx of new athletic directors around the league and reinvigorated discussions being had, bigger changes could come soon.

Sliding the schedule forward might benefit Ivy newspaper columnists most of all. They would no longer have to make contrived comparisons regarding pre-term planning and Ivy schedules during the second week of September.

They could make them about football teams instead.

—Staff writer Jacob D. H. Feldman can be reached at jacob.feldman@thecrimson.com.Follow him on Twitter @jacobfeldman4.