Ivy polls rarely right
By Justin Feil, Assistant Sports Editor
The Princeton University football team was not picked to win the Ivy League championship this year, which is one reason it feels so good entering its conference opener at Columbia on Saturday.
The pre-season Ivy poll has been correct about the Ivy champion just once in the last 11 years.
Only meteorologists have a harder time getting predictions right.
The first Ivy weekend proved costly to pre-season co-favorites Harvard and Yale. Both lost — and they have yet to play each other, meaning that at least one of them is very likely out of the picture for the Ivy title this year. Another year, another pre-season poll that ends up wrong.
I’m not sure why we in the media shouldn’t just give up. Do we really need a poll, except to use as fodder for declaring “upsets” and documenting collapses?
”Clearly anyone can beat anyone on any day,” said Princeton head coach Roger Hughes on Wednesday. “We’re much more like the NFL than any other conference because the pool of players we can all recruit from, it’s the same players. Every team has similar talent. It gets down to frankly which team wants it more on that day.”
Picking which team will want it most from the first to seventh game of the Ivy season is truly a guess. Experience should help Ivy teams, but clearly it’s not the lone factor for a league that has made a mockery of anyone trying to guess whose year it is. In the last five years, only one team has repeated as a champion, Harvard, and there have been five different champions out of the eight teams. From 1995 to 1999, six of the teams earned at least a share of a championship.
Princeton shared the Ivy crown with Yale in 2006. The Tigers were picked sixth that season, so it’s not just that the polls have been off a little. When the sixth-place pick wins the league, it raises some real questions on the validity of any subsequent poll to come out.
We might be better off following Penn coach Al Bagnoli’s 2007 idea of simply making the previous year’s champion the favorite again. It seems to be the way that most teams look at the league each year. Of course, the media did so last year in making 2006 co-champ Yale pre-season favorite.
”When you’re the defending champion and you’ve got a lot of kids returning, you deserve to be there,” Bagnoli said at media day last year. “Princeton as co-champ, they ought to be there too.”
The Tigers finished in a disappointing tie for fourth place last season. The Tigers aren’t even that highly regarded this year. They were picked fifth, which is just perfect as they look to ascend to the top of the Ivies again this year.
If they do so, the against-all-odds run will be the story week in and week out, as it was in 2006. Even if they historically haven’t been accurate, the poll selections shape the season’s stories. If Harvard or Yale wins the title, they are living up to their advance billing. If another team does, the talk will be of the upset and climb to the top that they have made.
As the Tigers open another Ivy campaign, they are hoping for the latter. Anything to prove the pollsters wrong again.

