Locations of
Ivy League schools:
University of Pennsylvania:
Philadelphia, PA
Columbia University:
Manhattan, NY
Yale University:
New Haven, CT
Harvard University:
Cambridge, MA
Brown University:
Providence, RI
Princeton University:
Princeton, NJ
Cornell University:
Ithaca, NY
Dartmouth College:
Hanover, NH
While the Ivy League prides itself on its academics, its athletics teams are national powers in several sports, including lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, ice hockey and wrestling (and probably a few others too).
Sportswise, the Ivy League is also unique in a few ways. When the Pac-10 conference revives their conference tournament for men's basketball in 2002, that will leave the Ivy League as the only Division I conference to not have a postseason tournament. The regular season winner gets the bid to March Madness. That bid almost always goes to either Penn or Princeton, as one of the P's has won the conference every year, starting in 1969, except 1986 (Brown) and 1988 (Cornell).
Also, in football, the Ivy doesn't allow their champion to compete in the I-AA playoffs.
Both the lack of a basketball tournament and ban on postseason football play are because the Ivy League "powers that be" feel it would take student-athletes away from the classroom unnecessarily. Many within the universities view this train of thought as elitist and outdated.