Why Are Ivy League Schools Still Playing Football?

College football returns this weekend. From the tiniest college to the largest public university, the campuses across the country await with eager anticipation the first kickoff.

Our most elite colleges, many of them in the Ivy League, are no different. The Ivy League consists of seven universities and one college: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth College. All are listed among the top 20 highest-ranked institutions of higher education in the country. Six are ranked among the top-20 best universities in the world.

Because of their high selectivity, their prized academics, their prodigious endowments, and their stellar reputations, Ivy League schools are the elite of our elite . Yet it strikes me that their faculties, students, and alums reflect in at least one area the cluelessness of Woody Allen’s stereotypical intellectuals: “They prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”

Sure, the populations at Ivy League schools are brilliant, but the fact that they aren’t protesting every fall that their schools still play football, that they aren’t boycotting those football games, shows that they have no idea what’s going on. Because the evidence is in: Football players are at high risk for CTE or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, severe brain injury.

All Ivy-League schools and all Division-III schools — those colleges and universities that do not offer athletic scholarships — should immediately stop fielding football teams. As with Division-III schools, no Ivy-League school offers football scholarships or athletic scholarships of any kind. Football is not for these schools a moneymaking enterprise. Nor are their football programs designed as a feeder system for the NFL, though players from the Ivy League, maybe a couple each year, do end up on NFL rosters.

Like the Ivy League, many D-III schools are highly selective, known for their outstanding academic programs. Among those schools are Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Amherst College, and the University of Chicago. Of course, not all Division-III schools offer the same caliber of superlative academics. But all of them are committed to the idea of the scholar-athlete — the person who participates in a sport solely for the love of the game and the benefits of competition.

My point is that dropping football at these schools and Ivy-League schools will not jeopardize any of their other athletic programs or participation by students in those programs. Neither, of course, will dropping football jeopardize their academic programs. Dropping football will not harm the schools’ reputations or allure, but, instead, will spare players from possible severe brain trauma that can be debilitating, even deadly. Of the 111 brains of former NFL players examined by neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee, 110 of them had CTE. Every position, including punter and place-kicker, has been implicated.

Even the NFL, ever reluctant to acknowledge any flaw in their billion-dollar enterprise, sees the link between football and CTE. Other organizations, such as USA Football, the governing board for amateur football, have altered youth games in light of the CTE evidence. The repeated blows to the head associated with football begin, of course, as soon as the pads and helmets come on, regardless of the age. Parents know this, which is why youth participation in football is down.

Schools renowned for brilliance, the Ivy-League and those highly selective Division-III institutions, can no longer ignore the risk to their players of brain trauma that is easily eliminated by abolishing the sport. The benefit for the Ivy League, especially, far outweighs the loss of some applicants and of possible financial donations. Neither of those losses will affect their reputations as highly selective. Those reputations are based on academic excellence; facilities; opportunities; and extensive social, cultural, and occupational networks. None of those disappears because football on campus does. In fact, showing the insight and courage to drop football could even enhance those reputations.

Everyone affiliated with Division-III and Ivy-League schools is smart enough to see the damage that football causes through repeated blows to the head, which are inevitable in the game. I’m not ignoring here the fact that soccer, hockey, wrestling, lacrosse, and other sports also have problems with repeated contact. But nothing in those sports approaches the magnitude of head trauma in football. A recent study of the football team at the University of Rochester — hardly a football powerhouse, even in Division-III — found that by season’s end the players averaged over 19,000 brain impacts that disrupted their midbrains.

So why do these schools keep offering football?

There is, of course, the rah-rah effect. Schools like the pageantry of football, the pretense that it somehow unites the campus, the appeal that the school honors athletics and makes room for — accommodates — “jocks.” The schools can have all of that without football. It is a senseless form of risk-taking.

I might suggest that every institution of higher learning drop football. But I recognize that the money that flows from boosters and television contracts, the ability to use some of that money to support less-appealing sports, the appeal of a big-time football program to lure recruits as well as students, and the substitution of major-college football as the NFL’s farm system all militate against dropping football at such academically intense universities as Michigan, Berkeley, Stanford, and Duke. For the sake of their players — all of whom are designated scholars as well as athletes — they should drop the sport regardless, but they won’t.

What is the Ivy League’s excuse for not dropping it? Tradition? Traditionally, all the Ivy-League schools except Cornell admitted only men. Yale first admitted women in 1969. Until that date, then, Yale had a tradition of 268 uninterrupted years of exclusive male admissions. Co-education ended other traditions associated with male exclusivity such as single-sex dorms and parietal hours. Isn’t it time to end the tradition of football?

On the other hand, Division-III and Ivy-League schools can preserve their football programs by taking two simple steps: first, remove helmets altogether. No Harvard player without a helmet is going to tackle by spearing or leading with his head. Next remove the massive shoulder pads. Blocking and tackling without shoulder pads and a helmet will become a very different skill.

But won’t football also become thereby a very different sport, more akin to rugby? Will removing helmets and pads alter the game to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as American football? Will the game then lose some or even most of its appeal? If so, then that tells us something about the nature both of the game and our fascination with it. Those steps of removing helmets and pads could then enable the brilliant to know in an instant what’s really going on.