The Ivy League started with some guy who had nothing to do with any of the athletics departments in Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton or Yale.
In fact, he was really poking fun at their sorry butts.
In 1937, Caswell Adams, a sports writer for the New York Herald-Tribune, complained to his editor about his assignment to cover the Columbia-Pennsylvania game in New York.
"Why in hell," he asked, "do I have to watch the ivy grow every Saturday afternoon? How about letting me see some football away from the ivy-covered halls of learning for a change?"
The extent of his objection did not extend farther than his comment. Clark Kent aside, he was the quintessential, mild-mannered reporter. But his flip tone struck a chord with one of his colleagues.
Sitting at a nearby typewriter, Stanley Woodward overheard the remark. Woodward, later the voice of the Baltimore Colts, wrote a weekly football review on Mondays that was carefully read and respected by football fans and coaches everywhere.
Respect is all well and good, but pissing people off is just more fun. Since the cheerleaders in those days actually wore bras, Woodward had to cause his own ruckus, and ruffling the starched feathers of elitist centers of academia ranked high on his list of favorite pastimes. A class act in the News-Letter tradition, this guy was.
The old schools of the East hated being grouped as a league and disliked the idea of conferences even more. Inspired by Adams' words that he'd overheard, Woodward slid in the term "Ivy League" in his next column, an article about the East's oldest colleges who were each other's own fiercest and oldest rivals on the field. The press caught on to the phrase, and soon, it snuck its way into common usage as well.
Fast forward to 1945: By then, the athletic directors of the "Ivy League" members had already been allied in unofficial leagues in basketball, ice hockey, baseball and swimming, dealing with each other on matters of administration, confidential exchanges of tactics and information, and competition scheduling.
In 1945, they signed the first Ivy Group Agreement, which dealt only in football, "for the purpose of reaffirming their intention of continuing intercollegiate football in such a way as to maintain the values of the game, while keeping it in fitting proportion to the main purposes of academic life." It addressed issues of academic standards, eligibility requirements and the administration of financial aid for athletes.
After years of informal intercollegiate dealings, the athletic directors of the newly-institutionalized Ivy League were formally organized into two, inter-university committees: one, made up primarily of the college deans, was to administer rules of eligibility; the other, composed of the athletic directors, was to establish policies on the length of the playing season and of preseason practice, operating budgets and related matters. Two other inter-university committees on admission and financial aid were added later.
In 1954, the Ivy Group Agreement was reissued to extend to all sports. The agreement established schedules for competition to insure that each college team would compete with the other Ivy League teams in a round-robin fashion, each season.
The idea of the original Ivy Group Agreement was to foster intra-group athletic competition while maintaining high academic standards. Today, the Ivy League schools are significantly successful today on a national level, recognized especially for their absence of athletic scholarships and their impressively high self-imposed academic standards.
The Ivy League, still known officially as the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, continues to grow today and is located on the campus of Princeton University.
Seemingly out-of-place in today's Division I ranks, the Ivies simply did not know what they were getting themselves into. When the league originated, Harvard, Penn and the others could compete with Notre Dame, Army and other football powerhouses due to an ability to rely on their intellectual advantage over the opposition. In the modern era of smarter, faster athletes, that advantage is lost. The days of the Harvard-Yale game mattering to anyone but students and alumni are long gone, yet the old war horses battle on. Let's hear it for persistence.
