Amy Potter: More than a win at stake this weekend

If you're a basketball fan, you can't help but love March Madness. The office pools, the endless debates, the favorites, the Cinderella teams.

And when your team -- the squad that you struggled with throughout the four-month season -- makes it to the tournament, it's that much sweeter.

Once again, Penn fans have the chance to follow their squad to the Big Dance. Tomorrow afternoon, the Quakers will square off against the Oklahoma State Cowboys. If they win, it will be the first time a Penn team has advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament since 1994.

As a longtime fan and after having covered the team as a sports reporter for nearly two years, I can assure you that there is no one out there who wants the Quakers to upset the Cowboys more than I do.

However, there is more at stake this weekend than just a basketball game.

This basketball season has been a tumultuous one in the Ivy League, and not for the better.

On Feb. 13, Harvard's leading scorer, Patrick Harvey, was deemed ineligible for the remainder of the season due to poor academics.

Then, not one week later, Princeton standout Spencer Gloger was ruled academically ineligible and forced to leave the university.

This, of course, wasn't my greatest disappointment, seeing as it made Penn's path to the Ivy title that much smoother.

However, when I step back to rethink the rulings, I am increasingly disgusted and worried.

This, unfortunately, isn't just about the Red and Blue taking the Ivy title again this year. Gloger and Harvey's ineligibilities have repercussions that may ripple and damage the rest of the league.

In June 2002, the Council of Ivy Presidents convened to discuss a hot topic -- Ivy League athletics. When the presidents sat down to debate, they brought to the table what I can only imagine to be a diverse spectrum of opinions and an overwhelming amount of data.

Not every Ivy school is as supportive of athletics as Penn. On certain campuses, such as Dartmouth and Cornell, athletics just aren't as big of a deal, and they hemorrhage money.

But that's not what came out of June's meeting. The Ivy presidents decreed three major changes in athletics policies. First, the number of football recruits per year must drop starting with the Class of 2007. Second, the number of football coaches allowed per team must drop as well by next season. And finally, in their last decree, the Ivy presidents decided that all athletes must have at least seven full weeks off from any sort of athletic practice during the year.

Since June, the final decree has been reworked, and in January, University President Judith Rodin admitted that the seven-week mandatory rest period did not realistically function as the committee had hoped. They are currently rethinking the system to create the intended effect, but in a slightly different manner.

It's not that these changes were really that drastic or demanding. Truly, the only teams to be hit by any significant change in the league were the football squads. The changes in the number of recruits and coaches will alter their respective squads significantly.

Most Penn teams went relatively untouched, despite having to restructure off-season training, but the seed of change has been planted.

The presidents began discussion of major changes after the 2001 release of the book by former Princeton President William Bowen and James Shulman, The Game of Life. The book uses empirical data to show that athletes receive special treatment during the admissions process.

The data also shows, by comparing the academic performances of walk-ons and recruited athletes, that recruited athletes for high-profile sports -- such as football and basketball -- tend to not perform as well in the classroom.

It surely doesn't help the case of Ivy athletics when two of the most high-profile athletes in the league -- Gloger and Harvey -- are forced to turn in their jerseys midseason because their grades aren't good enough.

As a fan of Ivy League basketball, I can only hope that the midseason expulsions don't cause the Ivy presidents to do anything drastic in the future. When they reconvene this summer, however, they will certainly have proof that the evidence put forth in Bowen and Shulman's book is not just hypothetical.

So this weekend, when Penn suits up for its first-round game, all of my well-wishing will be with the squad. This season, our very own Quakers just may be the antithesis of a league in academic eligibility turmoil.

And advancing to the second round will hopefully prove to the Ivy presidents that Penn's basketball team can compete on a national level while playing by the rules.

So good luck to the Penn men's basketball team -- here's to proving that good students can also be great athletes.

Amy Potter is a junior World History major from Albuquerque, N.M. and executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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