Ivy League cancels football and other fall sports due to Covid-19

The Game has actually been been aborted.

The Ivy League on Wednesday formally canceled fall sports, including its football schedule, due to the continuing spread of Covid-19. In a declaration, the league’s Council of Presidents called the choice “extremely difficult.” 

The eight-member Ivy league consists of competitors Harvard and Yale, who play each other to end every season in what’s called The Game. The other schools in the conference are Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth. In football, the Ivy League is not one of the NCAA’s primary conferences and its groups do not contend for the playoffs.

“With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk, consistent with the policies that each of our schools is adopting as part of its reopening plans this fall,” the league stated. “We are entrusted to create and maintain an educational environment that is guided by health and safety considerations. There can be no greater responsibility — and that is the basis for this difficult decision.”

Officials stated student-athletes will still be permitted to practice and train utilizing school centers in “limited individual and small group workouts.”  

The Ivy League will review when sports programs can resume by January 2021, which might consist of a choice on beginning a brand-new football schedule in the spring. The relocate to cancel fall sports might push powerhouse conferences to reevaluate their approaching seasons, specifically with football set up to begin late next month.

Kevin Warren, commissioner of the Big Ten, informed CNBC’s “Power Lunch” in May that his conference would aim to choose by this month on its fall sports schedule. 

“Even bigger than sports in the fall, we’re collectively focusing on what we need to do school in the fall,” Warren stated at the time. “If we don’t have school in the fall, we don’t have sports in the fall. And so, we have a whole other level of issues that we’re focusing on.” 

The Ivy League ended up being the very first college conference to cancel its guys’s and females’s basketball competition on March 10, due to the pandemic. The NCAA then canceled its 2020 competitions on March 12.

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