Coach Surace thinks Ivy football rules are stupid, and he’s right

One in every three Ivy League football seasons ends without an undisputed champion.

Unlike just about every other conference in Division 1 sports, Ivy League football has clung to a 60-year old tradition of playing without a tiebreaker for teams with equal records. Over the course of those sixty seasons, there have been sixteen championship ties and four three-way splits.

The latest stalemate came this fall when Dartmouth, Harvard and Penn all shared the title with 6-1 records (each team split their series against the other two). This means that 38 percent of the eight-team conference walked home with 2015 championship rings–the professional equivalent would be 12 NFL teams winning the Super Bowl.

Before this year’s crowded award ceremony, the most recent victims of the league’s trophy-sharing policy were the 2013 Tigers, who went 6-0 in Ivy play before dropping a heartbreaker at Dartmouth the last day of the season. In any other football conference outside Pop Warner, Princeton’s triple-overtime victory over Harvard–who also went 6-1–would have made them the undisputed champs. Instead, the Tigers were fitted for silver rings along with the Crimson rather than the gold ones they could have had to themselves.

Following the defeat in Hanover that stripped him of his outright title, head coach Bob Surace was pretty blunt with his thoughts on the league’s policy.

“I mean it’s only in, you know, ‘We Give Everybody a Trophy League’ that you share,” he said. “I mean come on. We tied and we beat Harvard, so…they crowned us champions last week.”

The media pressed Surace on the issue, and he didn’t back down:

Reporter: “So you don’t feel like you’re co-champions?”

Surace: “Come on. What’s the tie-breaker in every league?”

He was pretty animated about the issue:

The irony is that for a brief moment between the two seasons, these complaints would have looked laughably obsolete. The 2014 Ivy League schedule produced something that almost never happens in sports: a “perfect” standing.

That is, the No. 1 team (Harvard) finished 7-0, the No. 2 team finished 6-1, and so on all the way down to Columbia’s last place 0-7.

Even more shocking is that there were zero upsets. The second-place team only lost to the first-place team, the third-place team only lost to the second-place and first-place teams, etc.

On paper, it was a thing of beauty:

But that kind of meritocracy is far from the norm in a seven-game season where each team only gets one shot at their opponents. Four of the last ten seasons have ended in two or three way ties.

No four-way tie has ever been recorded, but league rules leave it well within the realm of possibility.

In fact, under the current system, it’s conceivable that as many as seven teams could tie for first place.

There are many ways this could happen, but we’ll go through the most plausible (the one with the fewest extreme upsets). Here’s how it works:

1) The first requirement in this scenario is a wild one: picture Columbia somehow having a subpar year and losing all seven of their games.

2) Harvard gets “upset” (is it an upset if everyone ends up in first place?) by 2014’s No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4 schools – Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton–but beats everyone at the bottom.

3) Moving from Harvard all the way down to Cornell, we assign the three most reasonable upset defeats each team can incur.

The result: Seven teams take first place with a 4-3 record…Columbia finishes eighth at 0-7.

If you need proof, here’s how it would look. Each team’s schedule runs vertically down its respective column, with each opponent listed on the left to correspond with a row:

Is this exact result statistically unlikely? Sure. Massively. But it’s not implausible. History has proven that a given Ivy can fall so far behind that it goes years without winning a game (sorry Columbia), and once the Tim Murphy era finally ends it might actually be possible for Harvard to lose more than two games (in the last 15 seasons, his Crimson have done so only twice. Naturally, one of those two down years resulted in a shared championship).

Moreover, this is just one possible permutation that yields a seven-way tie–there are over 20,000 others. Of course, this number is minuscule compared to the millions of total season outcomes that could occur, but the point is the stars don’t need to align in one exact way for this to happen.

So just how susceptible to shared trophies is the Ivy League?

We examined all 268 million possible season outcomes to calculate what percentage of them would result in a championship tie. In each season outcome, there is a unique combination of winners and losers for the 28 games played each year (there are two possible outcomes for each game, so 2^28 = 268,435,456 possible outcomes for a given season). Note that this model assumes all teams are evenly matched in a given year, and does not account for any specific team being better than any other:

There’s no telling if or when the Ivy League will join the rest of the modern world and add a tiebreaker to their football conference, but they’d be wise to get around to it before the first four or five-way tie in D1 history inevitably happens on their watch (we’re not optimistic, though, since this is the same group that bans itself from postseason competition every year). While Coach Surace maintains he doesn’t care how the league chooses to govern itself, the rule needs to be changed.

That much, at least, should be undisputed.