The Ivy League originated as an athletic association in 1945 when eight colleges in the eastern United States agreed to field football teams that were representative of their student bodies while upholding common standards of eligibility and financial aid. Leading this initiative were the Big Three—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities (HYP)—which had distanced themselves from Big Time athletics with a similar agreement after World War I. Now, they were joined by Brown, Columbia, and Cornell universities, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pennsylvania. It took another decade for something like an athletic league to develop (1954), but the Ivy League soon became an all-purpose union, officially organized as the Ivy Group of Presidents with offices at Princeton University.

The Ivy League formed to separate these schools ...