Photo c/o NESN
The Ivy League announced today that there will be no sports at its 8 member schools until January 2021!
In March of 2019, the Ivy League became the harbingers of what was to come with college sports. The oldest remaining "in form" conference in the NCAA was the first to cancel its post-season basketball tournament on both the men's and women's sides. A few days later, the Harvard Men's Ice Hockey team withdrew from their conference playoff series and became the last of the Ancient 8 schools to be listed as an active participant in sports for what would be the remainder of the 2019-20 academic/athletic year.
In the following days, many other conferences in both the FBS and FCS levels would begin to cancel their basketball and other winter sports tournaments and eventually announcing cancellations of the entire spring sports season.
Now, here we stand just a mere four months later and the Ivy League again is on the forefront of the college athletics stage as they have announced plans to postpone all fall sports, including the legendary football season to spring of 2021. Sorry Harvard fans, this means no edition of "The Game" until after New Years Day.
While the Ivy League does not have as much of a major impact on College Football and even perhaps the other fall sports as the Power 5 conferences do, this does have a domino impact to schools who participate in the Patriot League, which traditionally plays non-conference against Ivy League schools and may be a beacon of light on what schools who see themselves as academic equals to the Ivy League, such as Notre Dame, Stanford, Wisconsin, et al. who do have quite prevalent impact in the major conferences.
As went the Ivy League four months ago, so seems to go the rest of NCAA sports. With the decision made today, all eyes now rest on conferences like the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, et al. to see what their decisions come to be in the remainder of this week. Timing is of the essence here as NCAA rules dictate that mandatory football practices can begin on July 13th. It also is necessary for conferences and schools who will play to have some semblance of timing to be able to scramble for rescheduling now cancelled games.