Yale, Harvard et. al Basketball teams discover they can't get to the Big Dance with a handshake and a smile

The "apocalypse" as Seth Davis would put it is upon us. The Ivy League is seriously considering holding a postseason conference tournament to decide its bid for the Big Dance.

Now, I didn'a go ta one a'dem reel smurt skools out east, but I really can't see how this would be anything more than a sideways move for the Ivy League, who currently is the only D-1 league to award it's automatic NCAA bid to it's regular season champion after a true round-robin home and home schedule (wistful sigh).

1.) Most sports fans don't give a shit about the Ivy League, Ivy Leaguers give even fewer shits. ie) Name the last NBA prospect to come out of Cornell or Dartmouth.

2.) As Davis points out, hosting first round games at higher-seeded campus sites would drive up ticket revenue, but would lose the charm of a conference tournament bringing all the schools together. Not sure even that would do much better than the 826 people who recently watched Dartmouth and Brown, or even the 6,129 that watched perennial Ivy powers Princeton and Penn square off.

3.) Does the Ivy League really need to drive up ticket revenues anyway? Or can they just fill the gaps from their bottomless endowments?

There must be a reason for hosting a conference tournament. Oh wait, could it be that forcing Penn or Princeton (who have won 38 of the last 40 Ivy League titles) to play 3 more games in 3 days to make it to the dance could open the door to NCAA tournament riches for schools like Columbia and Harvard?

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