True, I think 1983 was the last season at 1A for Yale, and indeed it was leave the Ivy league and maintain on their own somehow, or agree to re-classify as 1-AA. It wasn't "given" the option though, Yale bowl - was the only Ivy league stadium that met the knew 1A classification seating requirements clause - that Joe Paterno pushed for.
Anyway - i think it's important to know our own history of college football right in our own yard, recognize it, and embrace it and learn from it. COllege football in Connecticut, and in the Northeast, and in the all the regions where we will need to recruit to play at the level of competition we want to be at regularly (top 25 in the country) did not start in 2003.
BTW: I don't know what 2012 attendance was in Massachusetts, but 2011 paid attendance for Yale v. Harvard at Yale Bowl was 55,137.
There are plenty of people in Connecticut that are interested in TRUE intercollegiate football. We need to tap that, and make it grow for UCONN.
Here is an excerpt from the Knight Commission, recommendations on revenue sharing from the college football playoff - published in 2012. It's recommended that payouts be distributed among all division 1A schools (FBS?) not sure what letters they are going by now, or will in 2014,...but it's recommended that money be distributed acoording to football program graduation success rates.
That - as we've learned - apparently wasn't adopted by the BCS people. THe college football post season needs to get under control.
http://www.knightcommission.org/images/pdfs/model_summary_final.pdf[/quote]
The Yale Bowl was not the only Ivy League football stadium which satisfied the 30,000+ seating requirement for NCAA D-IA. Back in the early 1980's, Penn (Franklin Field), Princeton (Palmer Stadium) Harvard (Harvard Stadium) and probably also Cornell (Schoellkopf Field) had stadiums with seating capacities above 30K. Palmer Stadium was razed in the late 1990's in favor of a new stadium which seats slightly less than 30K.
It was more likely the idea that the Ivy League would have to disband which forced those Ivy members who could have maintained D-IA status to accept DI-AA status in order to keep the league intact. For that matter, if it were necessary, I'm sure Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth could have come up with enough cash to increase the seating capacity of their respective stadiums back in the day if it would have meant maintaining I-A status. In 1956 when the Ivy League was formally chartered, the schools voted to never go to bowl games, so staying in the upper division of NCAA football didn't really matter much if you were voluntarily excluding yourselves from playing in bowls, as they still do to this day. I imagine that had a lot to do with the Ivy members going along with the demotion to D-IAA.