[OT] Huh?

Not exactly a banner week in I-A football, but ESPN GameDay at Harvard-Penn?

[www.dailypennsylvanian.com]

It's neat to see Ivy football get some recognition, but this is a real head-scratcher.

Fowler and Herbstreit will also be doing the radio show "On Campus" from Penn, 7-9 pm Friday night on ESPN Radio (1160 AM in the Ithaca area, if you're curious).

I hope the ESPN folk delve into the Ivy football postseason ban. I personally think it's a stupid rule and am against it. Coach Pendergast has repeatedly said the same thing throughout his tenure here. The justification can't be that teams are missing their finals; we allow our lacrosse teams to play in NCAA tournaments during finals period (and besides, the I-AA tournament doesn't conflict with exam time at Harvard and Princeton). The only thing that I can think of is that it's either pure obstinance, or possibly that the four schools that end their seasons with big rivalry games (Cornell/Penn and Harvard/Yale) want those final games to be the defining moments of their seasons. If you're Harvard last year, and you complete a 9-0 season by beating Yale, would you really want to go down to Statesboro, GA and potentially get clobbered 37-3 by Georgia Southern? I'm not so sure I would be. A relevant Sun article from last year is at [www.cornelldailysun.com]

Between this, restrictions on schedule length (including that in hockey), and the "seven-week-off" rule imposed this year on all sports, the Ivy League throws roadblocks in the way of the success of its athletes and teams. By no means should the League sell out its soul by permitting athletic scholarships or making concessions in academic standards. But within the scope of its founding principles, the Ivy office should be more supportive of the endeavors of its athletes on a national level.

As for why they're doing this, the matchup between 5-0 Harvard and 5-0 Penn is being billed as the de facto Ivy championship game. (They apparently don't think much of our chances of knocking off Penn (unlikely) or Yale's chances of doing the same to Harvard (less unlikely) next weekend.)

(Why they wouldn't have thought to do this two years ago, when two schools who are actually rivals met on the actual last weekend of the Ivy season in a game that actually did decide the Ivy title is beyond me.)

Oh please, don't kid yourself. The game between Cornell and Penn is no more of a rivalry than any other Cornell game. Pendergast said himself that he considers all the league games rivalries, it's just that they like to beat Penn and end the season on a high note. True, among the band members it is a rivalry, but the football players don't get up for that game any more than the others (if they get up for any at all these days.) Harvard, at the beginning of the season, was nationally ranked (on account of their undefeated season last year) and is a much bigger football school than Cornell is, so I'm not surprised they picked this one at all. I would be less surprised if they broadcast the Harvard/Yale game, though. It is nice for such great schools and programs to get some national TV time.
Oh, and whoever wins this will be the Ivy champion even if they do lose the last game, because this would then be the tiebreaker among two 6-1 teams.

OK, so Cornell/Penn isn't THAT much of a rivalry. (It's certainly no Texas/Oklahoma or Harvard/Yale.) But it's more of a rivalry than Harvard/Penn, and that game literally decided the outright title. The winner of this game is guaranteed a share of the title; there are NO tiebreakers in Ivy standings. If Harvard wins, but loses to Yale, and if Penn beats us (OK, when Penn beats us), Harvard and Penn would share the title.

So what other games were being played that weekend of the Cornell/Penn game? I do agree that the Harvard/Yale game regardless of its title implications probably would seemingly have made a better showing for the Ivy League on GameDay than this game. I may be wrong, but take a look at the schedules for the Top 25 teams this week...there really aren't that many huge matchups that would necessitate ESPN GameDay coverage so it seems like a good week for them to look into the Ivy League scene. I can guarantee that they wouldn't pick an Ivy League game over Miami/Florida State...Florida/Florida State if those games happened to be on the schedule this week. (Can you guess where I'm from?) Anywaaaay...it should be pretty cool to see it on TV regardless...hopefully the Penn/Harvard fans will kick it up a notch and do some major tailgating so its not an embarassment.

I'm just hoping that this Cornell/Columbia game I'm going to this weekend doesn't suck too much...

For at least the last decade, the final weekend of the Ivy football season has been Cornell/Penn, Harvard/Yale, Dartmouth/Princeton, and Columbia/Brown. I can't remember what games were going on during the weekend of Cornell/Penn two years ago, but I'd say that even if CU and UP were both 9-0 going into the season finale this year, the self-proclaimed "Worldwide Leader in Sports" would certainly pick Michigan @ Ohio State to send their crew to.

The whole thing was apparently Beano Cook's idea - he suggested that GameDay should have been in Cambridge last year when Penn played at Harvard and both were undefeated overall. (The show was at Florida-South Carolina that day last year.) And Jason is undoubtedly correct in saying that ESPN would not eschew a Top 5 or Top 10 game for one such as this. According to the coaches poll it sponsors, there are no games this weekend between two top-25 teams.

Sigh. So Cornellians have gone the way of Penn students before them and forgotten the Cornell-Penn rivalry? I was going to post a link to the Cornell Magazine article about the rivalry, but that was published on the 100th anniversary in 1993, and their archives only go back to 1998.

I remember Beano Cook lobbying for Penn-Harvard last year.

This might be a figment of my imagination, but didn't ESPN once broadcast a Cornell-Penn game on Thanksgiving Day?

Jay Wang wrote:

This might be a figment of my imagination, but didn't ESPN once broadcast a Cornell-Penn game on Thanksgiving Day?

Right you are. It was in Philly in 1989. A year earlier the 5-1 Red and 6-0 Quakers had played at Schoellkopf for a share of the title, while ESPN showed Hahvahd and Yale. At least one member of the press (not from Ithaca or Cornell) commented that the real Game was in Ithaca that day. So the following year they tried a throwback to the old tradition of Cornell-Penn at Franklin Field on Thanksgiving Day, incidentally freeing up ESPN to televise that game as well as H-Y as part of their Ivy Football package. And of course both teams stunk up the league that year, entering the game at 2-4 and 1-5. The consolation for Cornell was that despite having a terrible season, we ended it with a win over our the hated Quakers. (The two Ivy wins that year were vs Harvard and Penn, against whom we went 8-0 in football in my four years on the Hill.)

Oh, and did I mention the blizzard the night before?

Cornell-Penn was broadcast Thanksgiving morning in 1989. Fittingly, it snowed the night before.

Let me know how the broadcast goes on Saturday afternoon. I'm a high school coach, and I've got something else to do then. Besides, I've never programmed a VCR in my life.

As a very recent alum, I still think of Penn as Cornell's traditional rival. But, the operative word there is "traditional." I don't think anyone gets particularly fired up about Penn anymore, but then again, few people at Cornell care about any football games. Perhaps the demise of the Penn hockey team has something to do with the fizzling of the rivalry.

As Jason notes, the Ivy League marketing dept. checked the Top 25/BCS schedule, and apparently got the ball rolling.

See

[www.sportsnetwork.com]

Looks like the game will also be telecast live on YES network.

I believe our rooting interest is for the ground to open up and swallow both teams whole...

Let's GO TURF!!!

irc://irc.warped.net/ipc

Halftime in Philly - Penn 34, Harvard 2.

...and Cornell trails Columbia 7-3 early in the third (according to the McPaper).

I think it's great that they did Gameday from an Ivy site, although I noticed they did a story on the Harvard WWE guy -- sigh.

Reading Bob Kane's excellent history of Cornell athletics, "Good Sports," it's clear that Cornell-Penn is one of the great Ivy football rivalries, and by far the biggest Cornell football game. I think the decrease of the importance of the game to current Cornell students has more to do with the loss of importance of Cornell football in its entirety than anything else.

Marcus Blanks scores on a 9 yard run - point good.

Cornell 10, Columbia 7

Not to mention Chris Fowler noting that today is the 62nd anniversary of the first Fifth Down game.

Greg wrote:

I think the decrease of the importance of the game to current Cornell students has more to do with the loss of importance of Cornell football in its entirety than anything else.

No question.

The Ivy League didn't help when it decided to open the season with the Cornell-Penn game alternate years in Ithaca (with Cornell hosting Princeton the other years, while Penn opened at Dartmouth). The idea was to always finish the year playing at Penn or Princeton because the weather there would be better in late November than in Ithaca and Hanover.

So much for tradition.

Our frequent lack of competitiveness hasn't helped, either. Penn's going after their 12th Ivy championship this year (and it's lookin' pretty good), eleven of which have come in the last 21 years.