The New York Times examines the decline in Ivy football attendance that accompanied the shift from NCAA Division IA to Division IAA.

That decline is one of the reasons why Princeton recently demolished Palmer Stadium (Henry J. Hardenburgh, 1914) and replaced it with the lower-capacity Princeton Stadium (Rafael Viñoly, 1998), and why Dartmouth recently replaced some of Memorial Field’s seating with the Floren Varsity House (Centerbrook, 2006).

(The Times notes that Ivy schools’ teams “were perennial national champions from 1869 to 1939.” That should read “from 1874 to 1939,” since 1874 was the first time college football was ever played in the U.S. (Harvard v. McGill). The game that teams played for several years following 1869 was soccer. The confusion might come from Hickok Sports, which lists pre-1874 soccer games at the head of a line of football champions, or from the Rutgers University football page, which still claims that the 1869 game makes Rutgers the home of college football, although the very same webpage acknowledges that the game was played under rules “adopted from those of the London Football Association,” i.e. soccer. The first game of college football ever played between two U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875.)

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Princeton Stadium news item replaced with Wikipedia link.]