This Ivy League men’s basketball season, Brown men’s basketball will open its conference season against Penn.
Brown and the Red & Blue have formed a bit of a rivalry in recent years, facing off in key battles in the last three seasons vying for a berth in the Ivy League Tournament.
Brown has come up just a bit short in these moments and is yet to win an Ivy tourney bid. The Penn Band adds a raucous element on the road.
But here’s a group who won’t be in Providence for the matchup: the vast majority of Brown students.
The current Ivy League basketball schedule starts during the winter break of most of its member schools.
That means if you’re one of the Ivies whose conference schedules are frontloaded with home games, your students are still on break and missing out on that critical stretch of contests.
Brown falls in that category this season, with five of its first six Ivy games coming at the Pizzitola Sports Center during the school’s winter break.
Brown’s students will miss key matchups like Monday’s Ivy opener against Penn and showdowns versus Harvard and Dartmouth later that week.
Making the matter worse, one of Brown’s home games falls on the final week of Ivy play, meaning Brown fans must hope their team’s fate hasn’t been sealed by then. If that fate is indeed already decided, that would leave only one non-winter break home game with Ivy League Tournament implications the entire season for the Bears.
This conference schedule sends the wrong message. Teams like Brown already lack the fan support from the student body the Ivy League should hope for. This kind of scheduling prevents a culture of student support from truly growing. One imagines what a shame it would be if a strong start to Ivy play for a team like Brown ran its course when students wouldn’t be on campus to come support the squad.
And this is before one gets into competitive balance issues.
With pandemic attendance restrictions, this wasn’t as much of a concern last season. In fact, the ability to reschedule games canceled for COVID concerns seemed to validate the schedule change. But as concerns about the pandemic wane, the flaws of this model begin to stand out more.
Over 2,500 fans attended Brown’s home game against Yale in 2020, a 73-62 loss on January 24, a game that was played after winter break amid Bruno’s last Ivy home stretch before the pandemic.
But just 1,363 attended Brown’s home game against Yale the previous season, played four days before spring semester classes began on Jan. 19, 2019.
If that impact of nearly halving attendance persists, it’s hard to see how home court advantage will affect all Ivies fairly over the course of the Ivy season. The Ivy League needs to do some serious soul-searching to determine whether the integrity of the league’s play can continue.
The competitive imbalance and hindered ability to grow team support that comes from this scheduling inequity sends a poor message to Ivies like Brown that have struggled to crack the upper echelon of the conference. The message sent by the league is a lack of interest in more competition from the top to bottom of the conference.
Returning to the popular format of back-to-backs and scheduling weekly changes from home to away matchups throughout conference play would fix many of the problems the new schedule has created. Hopefully, the Ivy League will reexamine the new status quo and bring back a schedule that made Ivy weekend nights so special in the college basketball landscape in the first place in future seasons.