2017’s biggest change leads off, as the Ivy League will hold a conference tournament for the first time. The top four finishers in the regular season standings will head to the Palestra for semifinals on Saturday, March 11th and a championship game early on Selection Sunday afternoon. Currently, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale are set to attend, with the fourth spot going to either Columbia or host Penn depending on next weekend’s results and quite possibly some tiebreakers.
This change means that the Ivy — normally one of the first conferences to award an auto bid, barring a one-game playoff (last employed in 2015) — will become one of the last.