Among the tens of thousands of college athletes who compete for an N.C.A.A. championship, there is one subset who never get the chance: Ivy League football players.
Since the conference began play in 1956, as a bulwark against athletics encroaching on academics, Ivy League football seasons have come to an end on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
No bowl games. No playoffs.
But that will change next year after the Ivy League’s presidents announced on Wednesday that they will allow the league’s teams in the Football Championship Subdivision’s 24-team playoff, which features schools formerly categorized by the N.C.A.A. as Division I-AA.
The inability to participate in the playoffs has been a persistent source of disappointment among Ivy League coaches and players, so the announcement on Wednesday was welcome news to the eight programs.
“That’s the joy of competition,” said Bob Surace, who played at Princeton and is the longest-tenured football coach in the league after completing his 15th season. “There’s a score and somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose, and you find out on that day who is the better team.”
When previous appeals to change the policy were not granted, there was rarely any reason given — other than that Ivy League presidents needed compelling evidence to break from the status quo. And as more evidence linked football to brain injuries, the case for playing more games was harder to make.
The Ivy League has been at the forefront of efforts to mitigate dangerous play. In 2016, the league followed the lead of a former Dartmouth coach, Buddy Teevens, and banned tackling during practice, a protocol that has been adopted by many other colleges and the N.F.L. It also moved kickoffs up to the 40-yard line, resulting in more touchbacks and fewer high-speed collisions that result in severe injuries.
But the conference reconsidered its stance on allowing postseason participation after hearing from student-athletes.
Mason Shipp, a receiver at Yale, crafted the proposal along with Leah Carey, a softball player at Brown, and Chloe Maister, a lacrosse player at Cornell, and presented it to the presidents this year. They worked with Robin Harris, the Ivy League’s executive director, and enlisted fellow members of the Ivy League Student-Athlete Advisory Committee — which aims to improve the overall well-being of student-athletes at the schools — to get the attention of administrators on each campus.
“The reason it was unique was it came from us,” Mr. Shipp said in an interview on Wednesday. “They value our voice. This was our words, our writing, and the beauty of it was, yes, a football player was involved, but so was a Brown softball player and a Cornell lacrosse player.”
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