Ivy League football to compete in FCS playoffs beginning next season

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The Ivy League will compete in the FCS playoffs beginning next season, the conference announced on Wednesday, ending a century-long postseason ban originally aimed at allowing the athletes to focus on their schoolwork.

“It’s a monumental day in the Ivy League and a special day to be an Ivy League student-athlete,” said Yale receiver Mason Shipp, who was the chair of the conference's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee that pushed for the change after a year-long study. “For the future generations that are fortunate enough to represent the Ivy League in the FCS playoffs, go win us some hardware!”

The 2024 Ivy League season ended with Columbia, Dartmouth and Harvard earning a share of the championship; it was Colombia's first conference title since 1961. The league will spend the offseason coming up with a tiebreaker to determine how its automatic qualifier for the FCS playoffs will be awarded.

“Thank you to the Presidents for giving the student-athletes an opportunity to compete for a national championship,” Harvard coach Andrew Aurich said. “Ivy League football is the most competitive it’s ever been and I’m excited for us to make some noise in the playoffs for years to come.”

The schools that would later form the Ivy League were a force in college football in the leather helmet days that predated the forward pass, with Yale and Princeton winning 23 of the sport’s first 25 unofficial national championships in the late 1800s. Harvard claimed the other two and went on to add five more, including a 1919 title that was sealed by a victory over Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

That would be – for at least the next century – the Crimson’s only postseason appearance, with Harvard, Yale and Princeton voting a few years later to decline bowl invitations and maintain their focus on academics.

A few things have changed since then.

As college football grew, the balance of power shifted from the Northeast to the south and west. Mammoth stadiums turned the sport from a quaint little endeavor for the students to a focus of campus life. Lucrative television contracts helped fuel the business for schools. Athletic scholarships became a lure for player, and the rise of the NFL gave college players a chance to make football a career.

Still, the Ivy League, which became a formal athletic conference in 1954, resisted the temptation of big-money college sports, forsaking bowl games and what is now the FCS playoffs to avoid the disruption on academics. But what really made its football postseason ban an anomaly was the growing number of other sports at the schools.

At Harvard, longtime football coach Tim Murphy liked to point out his was the only one of the school’s 42 varsity sports that was deprived the opportunity to participate in its postseason.

Starting in 2025, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference are the two remaining FCS playoff holdouts. (The biggest football conferences and schools, like Alabama and Georgia in the Southeastern Conference and Michigan and Ohio State in the Big Ten, compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision, which crowns its national champion through the separate College Football Playoff.)

Although the sport has mostly outgrown the Ivy League roots that pioneered the forward pass, the bowl-shaped stadium and — more recently — tackle-free practice to diminish the risk of concussions, a player from the conference has participated in 10 of the last 12 Super Bowls. NFL front offices and sidelines are also teeming with Ivy alums.

“The Ivy League prides itself on a storied tradition of impact, influence and competitive success throughout the history of college football," executive director Robin Harris said. “We now look ahead to a new chapter of success.”

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AP researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.