Games per year

Where does the Ivy limit of 29 games come from? Wodon's article on the ECAC teams forming a new conference made it sound like the AD's were in favor of adding games but the ECAC said no.

Here's a quote from Yale coach Tim Taylor on the subject, taken from a Wodon article published 31 May 2001:

[Q]Said Taylor, "Ivy hockey always cued itself off basketball. They played 26 games, so that's where hockey was. Basketball across the country doesn't start until November 1, so that seemed like a good time to start. This goes back to the '60s. So gradually we expanded under the Ivy umbrella. But we're still operating under [many of] those restrictions."[/Q]

Link to article: [www.uscho.com]

I suspect the limit is decided by the Ivy presidents.

Two quotes that may be of interest from The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, by James Shulman and Bill Bowen (the latter a former Princeton president).

"It is interesting to note that, despite the widespread collective recognition enjoyed by the eight Ivies, their only formal connection is through sports, and the only time that their presidents officially convene is to discuss athletic matters at biannual meetings."

"The league had hesitated to form a conference officially throughout the 1930s and 1940s out of concern that differing academic standards and financial resources within the group would make it hard to share common goals. Finally, with the legalization of athletic scholarships in 1956 (which they opposed) [Al's interjection here: prior to that all scholarships were supposedly need-based only], the schools signed the original Ivy principles."

We have gradually inched up from 26 to 27 to 29, where we've been stuck for a while. We've all but run out of schedulable weekends now, so the thing to do is to move the season start date to where the rest of the NCAA starts. The later start is what screws the Ivies anyway, since we wind up with an Ivy playing its 1st game of the year against an NC foe who already has played 4 or 5 times. But once you get rid of the artificial late start date the games restriction has even less meaning. Every suggested change has to go through a big song and dance with a lot of political posturing , so if we ever have the capital for the start date move, best to kill two atavisms with one improvement.

It would be nice to have one maverick Ivy president who kept pace with the smart things the "informal association" does but called b.s. on the braindead things, but "university president" and "maverick" are not terms that come up in the same sentence very often.

It is also, I assume, a rarity (and this is a good thing) that a would-be university president makes his case with "Issue one. We have to get our hockey teams a 32 game schedule."

Maybe, but I wouldn't mind if it was issue twelve or fifteen or so.