The Ivy League announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement to host the men’s and women’s postseason basketball tournaments at the PPL Center in Allentown, Penn. for three years starting with the 2027-28 season.
“The PPL Center provides a neutral site in a first-class venue, a vibrant downtown setting and a location that is accessible to so many of our alumni and fans,” said Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris in a press release issued by the league office. “We believe this partnership creates an exciting opportunity to continue elevating the championship experience for our student-athletes and Ivy League basketball overall.”
The agreement begins in the 2027-28 season and runs for three years through the end of the 2029-30 season.
The move supplants the current system of rotating the location of Ivy Madness among the eight Ivy campuses, a paradigm the league has used since 2019 after the first two Ivy League Tournaments were held at the Palestra in 2017 and 2018. Since then, Ivy Madness has made the rounds to every Ivy campus except Dartmouth.
The Ivy League announced in April that it would interrupt the schedule for the upcoming 2026-27 season by moving Ivy Madness from Dartmouth’s campus in Hanover, to the Palestra in Philadelphia to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Cathedral of College Basketball.
But the league was coy when it made its announcement in April about whether it planned to return to the original schedule to allow Dartmouth to finally host Ivy Madness in March 2028.
Now we know that it will not, leaving Dartmouth in the cold as the only Ivy school never to host Ivy Madness for the foreseeable future.
In its press release, the Ivy League heralded the quality of the PPL as a sports venue and the central location of Allentown to the Ivy community: “Located in the heart of the Lehigh Valley, PPL Center provides Ivy Madness with a premier arena setting and a centralized location within the league’s geographic footprint.”
But while Allentown is within relatively easy driving distance of Penn, Princeton and Columbia, students from the League’s northern outposts of Harvard and Dartmouth will have to make a trek of over 300 miles to see the action. Moreover, the closest major airports to Allentown are Philadelphia and Newark, N.J., both of which are roughly a 75-minute drive away from the PPL Center.
Perhaps more concerning, the Lehigh Valley itself is not host to any Ivy campus, meaning that Ivy Madness may face a challenge in attracting local residents to attend and support the event.
The primary benefit of this decision is that it assures no team competing for an Ivy League Tournament championship will have home-court advantage beyond the upcoming season. In the eight previous seasons in which Ivy Madness has been contested on an Ivy campus, the host school has won five times, including Penn’s women in 2017, Penn’s men in 2018, Yale’s men in 2019, and Princeton’s men and women in 2023.
The fact that the Ivy League is willing to take this step underscores the degree to which the Ivy League Tournament has grown in prominence, not only as a national television event, but also as a means of determining who will represent the Ivy League in the NCAA tournament.
No Ivy League men’s team has won an at-large berth to the Big Dance, while only two programs on the women’s side, Columbia and Princeton, have won at-large invitations to March Madness in Ivy hoops history. Thus, for most Ivy programs, the only way to reach the Shangri-La of March Madness is to cut down the nets at Ivy Madness.
In other words, the pressure on every team to win at the Ivy League Tournament seems to have translated into a hardening of positions among member schools in favor of assuring neutrality in the tournament venue.
For that reason, Ivy hoops fans will soon share Billy Joel’s lament every March: “Well, we’re waiting here in Allentown.”
This is awful! It’s so much fun going to a different Ivy arena each year with my son, and I was really looking forward to finally having it “home” in Cambridge in the future. Now I’m going to have to drive farther than it would take me to get to literally any of the other Ivy schools.
This is not an equidistant location, and honestly… who really wants to go to Allentown for three years?
Feels instantly like the New Coke of sports decisions. All sorts of rational reasons for it, but at bottom just a total disregard of the brand’s core asset – namely Ivy alumni’s deep love of the schools and their campuses.