Ferd Lewis: Ivy League could set the tone for football

Is Wednesday shaping up as a Groundhog Day of sorts for some of college football?

You might wonder as the Ivy League’s Council of Presidents pokes its collective head up out of academia and announces whether its eight schools (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale) plan to play their 2020 football season as scheduled, truncate it or move the whole thing to the spring.

Ordinarily, what the Ivy League does carries little weight with much of the big-time college football universe, where its group of elite private schools is regarded as something of an anachronistic outlier.

But, then, you might also remember, it was the Ivies, who first saw fit to cancel their conference basketball tournaments in March, a move that was soon endorsed and followed by a flurry of cancellations by the other conferences.

The Ivies pulled the plug on March 10 and by March 12 everybody else, including the NCAA and NBA, had or was hurriedly shutting down.

Initially, the Ivies’ move was viewed as “drastic” and roundly ripped even inside the conference. Penn coach Steve Donahue called it “the most horrific thing I’ve dealt with as a coach.” Harvard guard Bryce Aiken tweeted, “Horrible, horrible, horrible decision … .” NCAA President Mark Emmert vowed the NCAA Tournament would go on as planned.

At the time, it seemed only Dr. Anthony Fauci, who we were just getting to know, applauded the stance.

Time — and the spiking COVID-19 cases — showed the wisdom of the Ivies’ move.

Now, we’re back again at another pivotal point in the confluence of college sports and the pandemic, wondering what the coming season holds and what it might look like. Or, if there will indeed even be one. This time it is football and the other fall teams that are on deck.

This time, the Ivies, and the impressive list of on-campus medical resources and minds they have to draw upon in making their decisions are in a position to be listened to. And, perhaps, even followed. Certainly by the other schools in the 13-conference, 125-member Football Championship Subdivision, where the Ivies compete.

Whether that extends all the way to the 130-member Football Bowl Subdivision, where the University of Hawaii and its peers in the Mountain West compete, is another thing. Especially when it comes to the well-heeled Power Five conferences whose big-business approach to football is planets apart.

The Power Five’s resources and revenues, built on mega-buck outlays for coaches salaries, facilities and humongous TV contracts, dwarf the Ivies, who do not offer athletic scholarships, deign not to participate in the FCS championship tournament and limit their schedules to 10 games a season.

That difference in philosophies led to the Ivy League being downgraded to a lower classification in 1981 and the two realms have gone their separate ways in football ever since.

But the pandemic has shown the judiciousness of the Ivies’ decisions about college athletics and care for their athletes in the COVID-19 cursed period.

Come Wednesday, when the Ivies announce whether they will play on, cut back or chuck the whole thing until the spring, it will be interesting to see who follows them.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.