Scurria | New Ivy tournaments by no means a panacea

Change is the hot word nowadays. But what about fairness? In a mad rush to dole out carrots, it's easy to forget the importance of the stick.

That's why I'm not sure conference tournaments are such a good idea - in any sport, in any league, including Ivy League lacrosse, one of the conference's shining beacons of success amid a sea of backsliding mediocrity. By giving more teams a chance to score an upset and deny a better one its rightful postseason bid, these tournaments can devalue success. The dangerous potentialities and bad precedents can easily be lost amid celebrations of the league's newfound egalitarianism.

If the top two or three Ivy teams are shoo-ins, then a tournament offers the hope of sneaking another, weaker one into the NCAAs if it pulls an upset. That is a good thing. But if the best Ivy teams are teetering on the at-large bubble, a loss for them in the tournament could produce a double-whammy - bouncing the stronger team out altogether and sending a weaker one in its place.

It is easy to see how this unpleasant outcome could happen, because NCAA selection committees overvalue conference tournaments in every sport.

Yes, a loss in the tournament is probably - probably - a good loss. But if ensuring good losses is what we're after, scheduling tougher non-conference opponents is the way to go, and a better way to expand the Ivies' presence beyond the Eastern seaboard. And now that this tournament is on the schedule, teams will have one less chance to do so.

I can't get over the fact that under the new format the regular season still determines the Ivy League 'champion' yet guarantees little else - no byes, just a higher seed and home field advantage. I know that complex tiebreakers to decide the automatic bid can smack of unfairness, but is discounting the regular season altogether really an improvement?

Penn Athletic director Steve Bilsky opposes a tournament for basketball, where the Ivy League is the only conference without a postseason. He appears to be fighting a losing battle. Of course, this is a different situation, since Ivy League hoops will never get at-large bids into the NCAAs - whoever gets the Tourney ticket and the auto-bid will be the lone representative.

But Bilsky has philosophical objections to a basketball tournament, he told me last year. Teams, he said, should get postseason bids because they made a long-term financial and administrative commitment to building a program. Not, he implied, because they got lucky one year.

If basketball players are any indication, Ivy League student-athletes generally favor tournaments, more so the worse their team is. It can be hard to argue with that; the games are for the kids, after all.

But aren't coaches and administrators there to take the long view and make the tough decisions, however popular? Don't they shape policies that are against what "the kids want" all the time? And isn't it telling that bad programs are always the ones that want conference tournaments the most?

I can't say for sure that I would have voted against this change. Any media exposure the tournament generates is good. And if kids really do want this, it could be a good selling point for recruits.

Of course, you could turn that last statement around and say that the Ivy League attracts certain athletes because of its uniqueness, and that conformity only diminishes the few comparative advantages it has.

If that happens, the Ivy League's uniqueness will become less of an asset it can be proud of and more of a liability it will need to apologize for. The only thing left to distinguish it from its peer conferences will be a lack of athletic scholarships. Some selling point that is.

Andrew Scurria is a senior International Relations major from Wilmington, Del., and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is scurria@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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