Update:The Ivy League has officially announced there will be no football this fall. A decision on pushing fall sports to the spring will come at a later date, the conference said. Said the Ivy League's council of presidents:
“As a leadership group, we have a responsibility to make decisions that are in the best interest of the students who attend our institutions, as well as the faculty and staff who work at our schools.These decisions are extremely difficult, particularly when they impact meaningful student-athlete experiences that so many value and cherish.
With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk, consistent with the policies that each of our schools is adopting as part of its reopening plans this fall.
We are entrusted to create and maintain an educational environment that is guided by health and safety considerations. There can be no greater responsibility — and that is the basis for this difficult decision.”
The Ivy League has made a decision on football, according to a report.
Lots of social media chatter was happening today about what the league was "expected" to do, and planned to move football to the spring, but no formal announcement on that has come from the league yet. Dana O'Neil tweets that the league is "hopeful that it can move fall sports to spring." Earlier this week Harvard and Princeton both announced plans to deliver online instruction this fall, seemingly setting the table for this decision to not play football on campus in the fall. Already, a number of college conferences including a few like the Centennial Conference yesterday, have announced plans to cancel their fall sports schedule and move them to the spring. The Ivy League may not have been the first domino to fall, as many (including myself) predicted, but they're certainly the biggest, and only Division I league to make that decision so far. A report from 247 today states that the Ivy's decision will have not sway decision makers at the Power 5 level, and that "optimism is dwindling for on-time start to season" at the major college level. With the Ivies possibly the only Division I league delaying football to the spring, it will be interesting to see what kind of viewership they get for games. We'll update when official word from the conference comes out. Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.