https://ivyhoopsonline.com/2025/04/13/could-division-iii-be-the-next-step-for-the-ivy-league/
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Richard: thanks for sharing your thoughts on where the Ivies are headed. In 1954, the Ivy Presidents made a decision to de-emphasize football because they were uncomfortable with the direction the (now Power Four) teams were taking. Keep in mind that Princeton had won a national title four years earlier, with Dick Kazmaier winning the Heisman a year later (and that was only 14 years after Yale players had won back-to-back Heismans). The Ivy teams were national sports powerhouses. The Ivy Presidents then presumably knew that eliminating athletic scholarships was going to decrease the competitiveness of their football (and other) teams and it did (although top Ivy teams remained in the top 20 in football into the 1960s and Princeton got to the Final Four in 1964 and Penn in 1979). Is there any reason to expect today’s Ivy Presidents to have a different view? Should they aspire to have athletes earning large sums of money to play football and basketball, even understanding that the consequences of the players not earning that money will be reduced competitiveness? Put aside whether you are comfortable with having a Xavian Lee or a Danny Wolf earning millions playing for your team (and those seem to be the numbers involved in men’s basketball based on claims I’ve seen), what is the economic case for that? A Duke or a Florida or a Michigan might get an economic return by having national championship-caliber teams but is there any world where an Ivy team will get a return? And I get that the NIL money will come from boosters, not the schools (although the schools are footing the bill for the House settlement payments, right?), but is some of that money being diverted from contributions to the universities themselves?
I think today’s Ivy Presidents will be even less comfortable with big time sports environment than their predecessors were 70 years ago. They can’t block NIL payments but it seems unlikely they’ll facilitate them. Would they consider a modest step of not requiring athletes who receive NIL payments to report that income as part of their financial aid eligibility? I doubt it but maybe they would consider that (probably by similarly eliminating student earnings during college being included in the calculation for all of their students). That might help the Ivies modestly but it’s not going to affect what a Lee or a Wolf will do.
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Good article! Hard to see the ivy changing much. Was shocked when they allowed football champs to participate in fcs playoffs. If they went d3, me, a fifty year fan is gone.