Some of the people who seem to have more inside information hint that the Ivy League is not willing to pay for a third party venue for the tournament. I buy that notion and think we will turn to the 1 seed hosting after we knock out all 8 schools being hosts.
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This complaining is pretty hilarious to me as a Cornell fan. We have made Ivy madness 5 years in a row, with rotating campus sites, odds are we’re gonna be home one of the times.
On top of this, every year before this we have to travel the farthest of anyone while every other Ivy is in your guys’ back yard. I’m sure you would still rather play us than Penn or Harvard, and if you are the team you guys think you are, you can beat a very middling team in Cornell even if we’re home.
Hope to see some of you guys in Ithaca Saturday, and I’ll be rooting for you the rest of the way if you make March madness.
this was the point i tried to make.
i only lament that okereke and wolf arent involved 
they voted on this, set the rotation and now we run out the string.
not sure we would rather play cornell though in round 1. i disagree with that in part because cornell can certainly shoot yale out of the gym so you’d rather they be on tired legs.
otherwise i think the discussion was more in hypotheticals as to the future rather than complaining per se.
i suppose i share in any lamenting that #1 plays #4 at home. but is what it is as noted.
if yale was bulletproof then there would be no worries. we are not as evidenced by recent history
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The random rotation is silly, but it’s still more fair than the original “Penn gets HCA every time” system. 1 seed hosts is the correct solution if you’re not going to spring for a neutral site venue. (My dad used to joke that the Ivies could get a great deal on a primo 7k+ seat neutral site venue, as long as they didn’t mind going far away from all the alumni.) Anyway, single elimination tournaments are very noisy, HCA matters is basketball, etc, etc, but also yes, Yale should win regardless. Rooting for Penn/Harvard to go 4OT.
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That’s funny. I’m rooting for Cornell to beat Yale in regulation. As to the ILT, no question that rotation is the most “fair.” It also is the worst for the product. The entire idea of the ILT was to bring mens and women’s teams together with their alumni fans in a Big Ivy Kumbaya. The Palestra was chosen to show off the Ivy product as only it can. Then 4th seed Penn almost (and should have were it not for a missed FT) beat Princeton and the entire idea went out the window. I understand the feeling but the answer was never the rotation—it should be a neutral site where the League can play all its games in single admission fashion and where everyone can gather and argue over which school has the most offensive alumni. The assertion that the Ivy League cannot afford a mid-sized arena as a neutral site is just ridiculous.
I’ve wondered ever since whether the ILT would’ve survived had Penn beaten 14-0 Princeton in that game. I miss the Fourteen Game Tournament, I can’t lie.
They wouldn’t draw flies to a neutral site. Can’t sell out ivy high school sized gyms now. The reward for winning a title should be to host.
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The original idea of “If we hold it, they will come” was a noble experiment that failed.
the “product” did not benefit from the Men and Women playing in the same place, and
attendance has not demonstrated we need arenas bigger than where League games are played. Let’s try hoe court of the regular season champ, and see if the logistics can be managed.
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Chimp: in your hilarity, maybe you missed the operative sentence in my post. No complaint at all from me. It’s completely fair for Cornell to host this year and Dartmouth next but the circumstance this year shows the weakness in the agreed system of an eight-school rotation with a one-seed forced to play an away game against the four-seed. Going to the home of the one-seed would at least reward the regular season champion (although there have been several years with first place ties and the one-seed determined in a way that left the two-seed dissatisfied). There were no empty seats in the 2024 men’s games at Columbia and relatively even fan support among the teams. The games should be played in New York where the tournament can prosper. Yale, Harvard and Cornell drew near-capacity crowds to MSG for in-season non-league hockey games ten or fifteen years ago. I don’t know what the cost of Barclays or MSG would be but, btw, that cost would be offset by ticket sales, so I doubt it would be a big risk.
Obviously it would make the most sense for Yale to be the Ivy representative to the NCAA tournament. Ivy Madness is ironically better named than intended–it is folly, it does not showcase the league, it does not bring attention to the best basketball in the league during the regular season, it does not pull big crowds, and it does not exploit the brand differentiation that the league desperately needs. (At least only the top four get to go, which is a plus.)
As for Yale having to play at 11:AM on Cornell’s home floor: Cornell really hasn’t been that great at home overall this year, and the venue rotation is just a fluke thing that helped them this year after hurting them in previous years, so that doesn’t seem much of an issue to complain about. The decisioin to combine the women’s and the men’s tournaments at the same place at the same time makes the whole thing more shambolic schedule-wise, but what can you do?