This news isn’t surprising. It was expected by most observers of the college sports scene in the United States. Nevertheless, now that it has happened, Americans will ask plenty of questions about the fate of college football and basketball: The Ivy League will not play sports this fall.
Sources: Ivy League programs have been informed that fall sports have been cancelled.
The conference will not entertain any sports being played until after January 1st.
Winter sports will have an update in mid-July on their respective practice schedules.
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) July 8, 2020
Let’s be very clear and precise about this: Canceling fall sports does not — at least not yet — mean that the Ivy League won’t try to play these sports in the spring of 2021. For now, this merely means there will be no sports played on or by Ivy League schools through the autumn of 2020.
It makes a big difference between the two possibilities — the Ivies fully canceling fall sports for the entire academic year, versus not playing sports in the fall but trying to play them in the spring of 2021. So, we don’t yet know what the Ivies’ entire plan is. We only know the plan through this calendar year; 2021 is still an unknown.
Therefore, an honest assessment of what this Ivy League news means for college football and basketball is incomplete. We would need to know if the Ivies want to attempt to play these fall sports in the coming spring. That decision might — I repeat, might; no guarantees in any direction — affect what bigger schools will do.
What does this news story mean? Many people will think the worst and say that the Ivy League — given its stature within American secondary education — will be viewed as a model for other universities, consequently leading to a decision to not play any sports around the country this fall, in all the FBS schools and conferences.
Other people will completely — or largely — disregard this story. They will make the claim that since the Ivy League ditched FBS (formerly known as Division I-A) football in 1981 and chose to downscale its involvement with football, the decisions and priorities of Power Five schools exist in a very different universe regarding football and hoops.
Both views have plenty of merit. The Ivy League does have pull and stature, but the Ivies took themselves out of cutthroat FBS competition as well and have a different ethos. Do I know which line of thought is more accurate as a political evaluation of the situation? No, I do not.
Here is what strikes me as the essential observation to make in the wake of the Ivy League’s decision: Do American leaders and administrators — in this case, the leaders and administrators at Power Five schools and Power Five conferences in particular — feel confident in following the lead of the Ivy League schools, which are widely regarded as our elite academic institutions?
You saw Harvard keep its full tuition price intact on Monday despite announcing online-only instruction for the coming academic year. Are other schools going to look at that and say, “If Harvard is doing that, maybe we should do that as well”?
OR, are other schools going to look at that and be appalled, and chart a different course?
Again, I don’t know the answer.
However: I think it is very much worth bringing up the simple point that just because an elite and prestigious school (or any elite and prestigious entity or organization) makes a decision, that doesn’t somehow confer enlightenment or wisdom upon the decision itself.
Ask yourself these three questions to get a sense of what this Ivy League news actually means:
1. Should Harvard get a “benefit of the doubt” attitude from other less prestigious schools — the ones which have to decide whether to play football and basketball in the coming months — or should it be met with skepticism (at minimum) or (more severely) fierce disapproval and condemnation?
2. Do the universities currently weighing football and basketball think the Ivy League is worth admiring, or do they think — after Harvard’s tuition decision on Monday — that the Harvard name and, more broadly, the Ivy League label are now hollow illusions which are part of a racket shrouded more in mythology than actual substance?
3. Are current events creating a shift in attitudes among the leaders at American universities toward Ivy League institutions, either in terms of eroding confidence toward a position of skepticism, or from a position of skepticism toward a position of outright opposition?
It will be fascinating to see how the coming months — all the way through the end of the 2020-2021 academic year — reshape the reality of American secondary education as an industry and as a culture.