Ivy League cancels fall season: Will the dominoes fall?

The Ivy League has cancelled its fall sports. Not postponed, cancelled.

Everyone in college football is taking a breath, now.

You might think that a bunch of rich schools cancelling sports isn’t a big thing. After all: Harvard? Yale? Who cares. They aren’t going pro on ESPN or anything (unless they are Ryan Fitzpatrick)…

But remember the Ivy League in March? They were the first to cancel their tournament because of COVID-19, and it created a domino effect that led to the cancellation of March Madness.

Could this happen in college football with the Ivy League schools taking these extraordinary measures?

Yes and no. The ‘Yes’ is the fact that what the Ivy League is very good at getting out in front of things. A lot of its members will be pushing to have online classes instead of in-person classes in the fall, meaning that there’s no point in putting out student-athletes if no-one else is on campus. And there’s also the fact that at Ivy League, they are all paying for the privilege of playing.

THE TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT

Of course there will be a trickle-down effect. There will no longer be cross-conference battles with the Patriot League. The Patriot League itself will then have its problems. For example, Holy Cross – who last year was given a bunch of money to get slaughtered by Navy and Syracuse – may well cancel its non-conference games. Lafayette has cancelled against Navy. Colgate has cancelled their Western Michigan game, Fordham will not play Hawaii and Colgate won’t go to Syracuse and Bucknell won’t play Army.

That means that Navy, Syracuse, Western Michigan and Army all have incomplete schedules going into 2020.

See where this rabbit hole goes?

The Ivy League’s move could be poison ivy.