The Ancient Eight: College Football's Ivy League and the Game They Play Today
By John Feinstein
Grand Central Publishing; hardcover, 256 pages; $30.00
John Feinstein has written forty-five books, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers, A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled. One of his recent books was Feherty, on the colorful golf personality David Feherty, which we reviewed in May 2023. He is a member of six Halls of Fame, and is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
In the engrossing new book The Ancient Eight: College Football's Ivy League and the Game They Play Today, Feinstein looks at a year inside the one conference that does not get outsize attention come fall.
The history of the Ivy League goes back to 1869, when Princeton played the first college football game against Rutgers. In 2023, Yale celebrated its 150th year playing football. Harvard started playing football one year after Yale, and they hold eight national championships, the last being 1919.
The Ivy League can also claim John Heisman, in whose name the honor for best college football player is named, as he played for both Penn and Brown. The Ivy League wasn't officially put together until 1956, and it comprises Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Yale, and Dartmouth.
The one appeal to Feinstein is that it will never change. "There was - and is - no chance that 'The Ancient Eight' will ever become 'The Ancient Ten' or 'The Ancient Twelve," Feinstein writes, in reference to the Big Ten evolving to have 18 teams this season. Of course, Rutgers is currently in the Big Ten.
Feinstein spent a year inside Ivy League Football to reveal the heart and soul of the sport's oldest teams amidst an ever-changing college football climate. The rivalries are as intense as any you can think of, but there is a genuine purity to the league. The rules are strict, and in order to have a chance at the NFL, a player must maintain the highest academic standards and be a great football player.
There is a unique culture that defines the Ivy League, and Feinstein's interviews with players, coaches, and key figures offer unparalleled access on the field, inside the locker room, and around campus.
In this excerpt, Feinstein writes of his affinity for the Ivy League: "It all began with the subway - specifically the IRT's number 1 train, which ran the length of Manhattan, from the battery to the northern tip of the island: last stop, 242nd Street.
By the time I was ten, I pretty much had the subway system down - especially the routes that ran to sports venues: the IRT took me downtown to Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, and the IND's D train landed at Yankee Stadium after I made the free transfer from IRT to IND at 59th Street. The number 7 train launched at Grand Central Station and became elevated after going under the East River from Manhattan to Queens and stopped, eventually, at Shea Stadium/Willets Point. At one point in my life I could name all twenty-one stops on the line. Shea Stadium was the twentieth.
And then there was the aforementioned number 1 train, which stopped at 215th Street, three blocks short of what was then Baker Field. If you want to watch the Columbia Lions play football today, you can get off at the same subway stop. The difference is you are now on your way to Robert K. Kraft Field at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium at the Baker Field Athletic Complex.
To me, it will always be Baker Field. Back then, it cost $4 to buy a ticket and there were always plenty of good seats available. Columbia had the occasional good player - quarterback Marty Domres, who played for nine seasons - one in the AFL and then eight in the NFL after the AFL and NFL merged in 1970 - was one example. George Starke, who became known with the Washington Redskins as the leader of 'The Hogs,' was another. He was a good enough athlete to also play center on the basketball team.
During Domres's three seasons as a starter - when I was first riding the number 1 train to Baker Field - Columbia was 6-21, finishing 2-7 each season. Even so, Domres was the ninth pick in the 1969 AFL/NFL draft, going to the San Diego Chargers. He backed John Hadl up for three seasons, before being traded to the Baltimore Colts prior to the 1972 season.
When the Colts decided to bench thirty-nine-year-old Johnny Unitas six games into that season, it was Domres who started in his place.
That was about as close to football glory as Columbia got during those years. In 1961, Columbia went 6-3 overall and 6-1 in the Ivy League to tie for first place. To this day, that is Columbia's only conference title.
Despite Columbia's many losses, I enjoyed going to Baker Field. Not only could I always get good seats, but you could go down on the field after the game and mingle with the players. Once, I asked a visiting team captain if I could have the game ball he was carrying and he looked at me like I was from another planet.
'The game ball?' He said. 'The game ball? Are you kidding?'
I figured it was worth a try.
Even after I went to college, I continued to follow Columbia and the Ivy League. In those days, the New York Times covered the Ivy League as a beat, so I was able to read often about Columbia's forty-four-game losing streak - which began in 1983 and ended in 1988, three coaches later.
The Washington Post, where I began working after graduating from college in 1977, didn't cover the Ivy League very much, but I often found excuses to write about players and teams in both football and basketball. In 2017, after Al Bagnoli has miraculously turned Columbia football around, I wrote a piece about Columbia's 6-0 start. A defensive back named Landon Bary, who had been on teams that went 2-8 and 3-7 as a freshman and sophomore, told me a story about what a thrill it was when the counterman at Milano's Market on 113th Street gave him a complimentary chicken and turkey sandwich after the Lions had stunned Princeton.
I loved doing stories like that."
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