Bringing Mysticism to the Ivy League

Like most of the country, I’ve watched a lot of college basketball over the past week. The NCAA basketball tournament is my favorite sporting event of the year and although I’m usually a tough critic, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the quality of this year’s games so far.

There have been a couple of things that have caught my eye. Firstly, I’ve been really, really, really impressed by the play of Stephen Curry—the sophomore from Davidson College is a beast. He plays like Reggie Miller, and he’ll pull up from pretty much anywhere on court. When we were making tournament brackets, my father had Davidson going all the way to the Elite Eight. I laughed at the time, but after Davidson defeated Georgetown, he’s looking more and more like a prophet. Curry scored 40 points in their first round upset of Gonzaga, including 30 in the second half. I’m looking forward to watching Davidson play Wisconsin in the Sweet 16.

Secondly, as a fan of Ivy League basketball, I had a vested interest in Cornell’s NCAA tournament performance. After Cornell went 14-0 in the Ivy League there was talk that they might be able to pull off an upset in the tournament, or at least make some higher-seeded team struggle to a narrow victory. Sadly enough, #14-seeded Cornell failed to do either of those things against a more talented, more athletic Stanford. The funny thing is that Cornell can’t fall back on the “at least we’re smarter and attend a better school” excuse, because the kids from Palo Alto probably hit the books just as hard, if not harder.

Naturally, when I thought about Cornell representing the Ivy League during March Madness, I considered what would happen if it were Columbia that were representing the Ivy League instead. Since Columbia’s 7-7 Ivy League record was clearly poorer than Cornell’s 14-0 league record, I’d say the most Ivy League games Columbia could have plausibly won en route to a league title would have been 10 or 11 games. This number would have set them up to receive a #15 or #16 seed in the tournament.

Can you imagine Columbia playing against Kansas or UCLA in March? I’m not even going to speculate on what would have transpired, but chances are we would have gotten abused.

Still, playing in an NCAA tournament would have been a great send off for Columbia’s seniors. Win or lose, that’s the sort of experience that stays with you forever. And who’s to say that John Baumann wouldn’t have gotten hot and gone off for 30 in an upset victory? The unknown hypothetical situations are my favorite part of the NCAA tournament. There’s something mystical about having hope and rooting for your team to pull off a miracle.

That’s why I am a proponent of introducing a conference tournament to the Ivy League. It’s the fairest way to ensure that every team has a chance to make it to the big dance and it gives fans all across the league hope that their team can do something special. The way the Ivy League is set up now, you have a lot of teams not playing for anything the last few weeks of the season, because statistically it’s impossible for them to win the conference. I think that a conference tournament would provide great motivation for all the teams in the league and possibly prevent teams like Penn and Princeton from going to the tournament year in and year out (although this year was an exception).

The debate over an Ivy League conference tournament has been going on for decades now. I don’t know if that change is ever going to be made, but in the meantime I do know that I get a ton of enjoyment from watching the NCAA tournament. I’ll be sad when the madness ends in a couple of weeks, but once it does, I’ll be looking forward to next year. A true fan always does.