Friday, December 20, 2024

Ivy League (2024)

This isn't your parents' Ivy League. Nor your grandparents'. Maybe not even your great-grandparents'.

Not one, but two monumental events happened this year that shook the Ancient Eight and their fans to the core:

1) Columbia earned a share of the league title for its first crown since 1961;

2) The Ivies agreed to participate in the NCAA FCS Tournament starting in 2025.

It's perhaps fitting that the last Ivy school to play a postseason game was Columbia, which upset Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl. Brown, Harvard and Penn also have tasted postseason action, all in the Rose Bowl. that's been it ... but wait 'til next year.

After the '61 title, Columbia plunged into decades of irrelevance until the arrival of Penn legend Al Bagnoli as head coach in 2015. After a couple rough years, Bagnoli guided the Lions to four winning seasons over the next five years. Although Bagnoli retired before the '23 season, successor Jon Poppe finally brought Columbia to the top.

OK, on to the uniforms. There were very few changes from 2023, so I'm just going to step aside and list them in alphabetical order. I'll add two points:

1) Penn wore nine different designs in nine weeks before using a repeat design in Week 10 (spoilsports!).

2) Cornell added a black alternate jersey, leaving Penn and Yale as the only Ivy teams to have not gone to the dark side at some point in their history.