Word: penns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When David fought Goliath he had an easier time than when Ivy League teams play in the NCAA basketball tournament. In the first round of the 1988 tourney, the score was Arizona 90, Ivy League Champion Cornell 50. The year before, North Carolina crushed Penn, 113-82. In 1986, Syracuse beat Brown by 49 points...
During the regular season, Ivy teams were regularly crushed by stronger non-league opponents. Duke 121, Harvard 62. Indiana 94, Penn 54. Temple 84, Penn 50. Wyoming 92, Columbia 56. Ivy League basketball teams are simply outmatched by teams from stronger basketball conferences like the Big East, the Atlantic Coast Conference...
...hasn't always been that way. In 1942 and 1944, Dartmouth played in national championship games. Even as recently as 1979, Penn went to the Final Four before falling to Magic Johnson and Michigan State. But now, according to league coaches, the Ivy League is unable to compete with the stronger conferences. Ivy teams are invited to play major teams which are looking for easy wins to pad their records...
While Harvard and Yale may have an advantage over the other schools because of their academic reputations, other Ivy League schools have much stronger basketball traditions. Some students might prefer a Harvard education over a Penn education but others might prefer a basketball career at Penn or Princeton--which have won 25 of the last 29 Ivy crowns--rather than at Harvard--which has never won the title...
...League officially became part of Division I-AA, which features a post-season tournament. (Teams are assigned to divisions based on the number of spectators they draw.) In 1986, the Penn football team was ranked number seven in the Division I-AA poll and would have earned a bid to the playoff had it been eligible. This fall, Harvard was ranked in the top 20 within Division I-AA, but could not test its talents against other highly-ranked schools...