Lazy Saturday morning, opens up time to go down rabbit holes. Given some of the changes in the Ivy conference schedule, it looks like someone in the League office actually thought about the Ivy schedule and its final weekend, and introduced subtle changes.
As we know, the season has ended with “travel partner” games (e.g. Brown & Yale). This year, though, the final weekend matchups align more closely with game that could impact Ivy Madness tiebreaker rules—meaning the games should carry bigger second-order implications. That’s a smart change.
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Men’s side: the last weekend mirrors the 2025 tournament’s opening round (1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3). By coincidence—or design—the other half of the schedule plays out last season’s 5 vs 8 and 6 vs 7.
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Women’s side: the last weekend features the 2025 women’s championship matchup and potential 2026 Ivy Madness game (Columbia at Harvard) plus Penn vs Brown, which has factored into deeper tiebreakers in recent years.
I’m not saying the schedulers were this deliberate—but they should be. Once the tradition of back-to-back Ivy weekends was broken, and there are six single game weekends, each season’s schedule ought to be crafted with two goals in mind:
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Setting up meaningful postseason races
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Building storylines that feed into Ivy Madness
Missed Opportunity: Double Headers
Unfortunately, it looks like there are no men’s and women’s double headers this season. That’s a shame. Ivy League women’s basketball is high-level and deserves broader exposure. Double headers—especially rivalry weekends—would make sense for both fans and programs (and athletic department budgets). Many of the other single-game weekends could easily be paired up.
Scheduling Wrinkles & Minutiae
For those who “appreciate” delving into the weeds:
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This is the first season in recent memory where the last game of the year isn’t a travel partner matchup. Travel partner games now show up as Games 1 and 8.
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Game 2 is paired with Game 14, which looks like a tiebreaker weekend slate of games that may be the starting point of the schedule. Games 5 & 11 make up the the other half of the “traditional Ivy weekend”.
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Games 3–4–12–13 form one home-and-away Ivy weekend.
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Games 6–7–9–10 form another.
Three additional quirks that imply someone consciously made a change from the status quo:
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The Men’s and Women’s Teams play 14 games over the same time window, the men had been starting later a week later.
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In past years, the Friday opponent in the first Ivy weekend would become the Saturday opponent in the second run. That “flip” is gone this season—The flip always felt slightly fairer, not sure it is statistically true.
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On Ivy weekends, the men’s and women’s teams are no longer playing the same school on the same day, but instead the opposite one of the same weekend.