Yale, Ivy League and other March Madness upset seekers face uncertain future amid college upheaval

By Canadian Press on March 20, 2025.

DENVER (AP) — Nobody does the underdog thing at March Madness better than the Ivy League. These days, that means nobody does it better than Yale.

As the 13th-seeded Bulldogs get ready to try to pull a big upset for the second straight year, the school’s athletic director wonders if all the change and money currently upending college sports could throw what many view as the real magic of the NCAA Tournament — when little guys knock off big guys — into limbo.

“This is another challenging time,” Vicky Chun said Wednesday, on the eve of Yale’s game against No. 4 Texas A&M.

“I do question, what is the future of the NCAA, in general?” Chun said. “We’ve always had the automatic qualifiers. We’ve always wanted access to prove ourselves there. But it is difficult, with the amount of money, especially in men’s and women’s basketball.”

Led by guard John Poulakidas, whose 28 points fueled last year’s first-round upset over Auburn, the Bulldogs are looking to add yet another chapter to the rich history of Ivy League shockers.

In so many ways, the Princetons knocking off the UCLAs, Harvards ousting New Mexicos and Cornells toppling Temples are the quintessential March Madness Cinderella stories. They are tales of teams from schools with exacting academic standards that are not known for hoops and don’t offer sports scholarships knocking off big-time basketball factories, some of which are looking more and more like professional training grounds every day.

It’s the very move by college sports to a pro-like model — terms of which are being dictated by a game-changing lawsuit settlement expected to be approved next month — that has placed the Ivy League and others on notice.

Chun says it wasn’t a difficult choice for the Ivys to reject the upcoming option — laid out by terms of the settlement — for schools to pay players directly for their name, image and likeness (NIL) sponsorship deals.

“I am on board with that. It was a decision from our presidents and I understand why they did it,” she said.

But the conversations the biggest conferences are having about exerting more control over functions currently run by the NCAA — and about expanding the tournament to 76 teams in a move presumably intended to give the biggest leagues more spots in the bracket — are concerning to ADs at schools like Yale.

“It is unsettling ground,” Chun said.

She believes the move by one player from last year’s tournament team, Danny Wolf, from Yale to Michigan — a possible second-round opponent in the East Region for the Bulldogs — wasn’t so much an issue of money as a chance to play for his favorite program, and one that recruited him to come as a walk-on out of high school.

Still, Wolf’s departure was a microcosm of what’s happening more and more in the new era of NIL and a greatly freed-up transfer portal: Players often use their first team as a stepping stone to the next one, and sometimes the next one after that.

During interviews Wednesday, James Jones, in his 26th season as coach at Yale, was thinking less about the macro world of college sports and more about his team’s chance to again grab some headlines in that realm.

“We feel like we can compete with just about anybody that we line up against, and hopefully we can prove that tomorrow,” Jones said.

Asked about the widening financial gap between the Ivy Leagues and the SECs of the world, Jones said: “I’m perplexed, actually. I don’t see a widening gap between us and anybody else.”

Maybe not on the court. Off it, though, Chun, in her seventh year as AD at Yale, portrays the upheaval brought by NIL and the transfer portal as just the latest in a series of challenges Ivy League schools have faced in trying to play a billion-dollar game under different rules than everyone else.

“I think we continually work on what our values are and look for that ‘1 percent’ student-athlete who’s really good and super smart and values that education,” she said. “I admit, if it wasn’t an Ivy League, or not at Yale, it would be a different picture.”

___

AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here.

Eddie Pells, The Associated Press