PAGELS: In Ivy League basketball, the search for significant seasons continues

What’s the purpose of a season in sports? No, this isn’t the first line of a James Earl Jones voice-over in my sports movie screenplay.

I’m asking, what is the point of playing hundreds of games over the course of months to determine a champion? And why are there so many games played in professional sports and so few played in Ivy League basketball?

I’m going to throw out a crazy theory: A regular season should strive to maximize the percentage of its games that matter. Now what does “matter” mean? Let’s define it as having an impact on the playoffs in a relevant way (relevant = more than just vastly overrated home-field advantage).

One problem with this definition: There are no playoffs in Ivy League basketball. Fourteen games per team are all that decide who gets the NCAA tournament nod. And while that’s probably the fairest way to determine who gets posterized by one-and-done future lottery picks from Kentucky or UNC early on the first Thursday of March Madness, fairness isn’t necessarily what leagues should strive for when it comes at the drastic expense of interest and excitement over the course of the entire season.

Take a look at the Ancient Eight basketball slate this season. After week one, Columbia was 0-2 and effectively eliminated. Done. Its 12 remaining Ivy games were rendered pretty much meaningless. After week two, you could also tack on 0-2 Brown and 0-2 Dartmouth to that list, meaning that after only eight days of play, the title chase had already been whittled down to just five teams.

This is almost completely due to the fact that it’s nearly impossible to make up a few games in the Ivy League’s short season, where you must finish the year atop the standings if you want to keep playing into mid-March.

While not having any form of playoffs is still vastly superior to the winner-take-all tourney that most smaller conferences have (effectively making the entirety of the regular season completely and utterly insignificant), it’s really not that much better. Instead, it’s merely displacing a team’s meaningless games from the first 80 percent of the season to the last 80 percent. In each case, the system doesn’t allow for the bulk of regular-season games to have any kind of impact on a team’s ultimate outcome.

This is a major reason the NFL regular season dominates the headlines from September to December. Because of its tiered playoff system, where the top two teams in each conference get a first-round bye, there’s still a major incentive to keep playing even after you’ve clinched a playoff spot. And in the reverse situation (where you might not be fortunate enough to clinch the playoffs by the time winter rolls around), there are just enough spots available for you to still be in contention—and not enough to make the regular season relatively pointless by allowing a laughable number of teams into the postseason club (see: NBA, NHL).

Let’s say the NBA ran the way Ivy basketball does, with a winner-take-all regular season. Right now there would only be about five teams with a realistic shot at winning the title. What would the other 25 teams be doing? About the same as what squads like Dartmouth and Brown are going through right now. But at least NBA teams in the lowest circles of hell have draft picks to plan for and trades to make for next season. Ancient Eight squads have ... impressing potential recruits?

On top of that—it’s Ivy League basketball. It’s already hard enough to fill low-capacity gyms. Do you think making the vast majority of your games utterly meaningless in determining the conference champion will help you out?

Luckily, there’s an easy fix to the problem that doesn’t stray too far away from the current system: Simply have the two teams with the best regular-season records play a one-game playoff to determine the champion.

This season, a battle for the No. 2 spot would involve a heated scrap between Penn, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell, which are all bunched together beneath Harvard. Instead of the dozens of games this weekend and the past few that have been relatively meaningless (since there’s no way some schools could leap the Crimson), there would be barrels of intrigue in determining who would head up to Cambridge in a winner-take-all bid for the conference title.

A one-game playoff makes the entire regular season much more compelling, and it wouldn’t compromise the integrity of having a regular season like 12-team conference tournaments do. This would not only increase the exposure of the league during the months of January and February, but also make the championship game an event with nationwide interest. America at large already seems to have an infatuation with the Ivy League. Surely a championship game to decide the Ancient Eight could land some airtime on ESPN2.

Until then, enjoy the rest of the exhibition season.

Jim Pagels is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies and English. He is a former Spectator sports editor.

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