Who needs playoffs? We've made the "big show."

On Saturday, ESPN College GameDay will come live from Franklin Field in Philadelphia when the Harvard football team meets Penn in what amounts to an Ivy League Championship Game. Both teams enter the game with 5-0 records.

ESPN's critically acclaimed College GameDay is college football's most comprehensive and authoritative studio show as host Chris Fowler and analysts Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit cover the angles of college football with game previews, one-on-one interviews, behind-the-scenes features, predictions and more before a live crowd.

The College GameDay road show began with a huge match-up on Nov. 13, 1993, with No. 1 Florida State at No. 2 Notre Dame. Since then, including Saturday's Miami at Tennessee show, GameDay has been to the site of 85 regular-season games, eight national championships and one conference title game. This will be their first trip to an NCAA Division I-AA venue and just the second to a game that did not have national title implications.

The Quakers and the Crimson are 22-0 against the other six Ivy schools over the last two years and the four overall losses they have sustained in that time have all been to ranked opponents.

Harvard Athletics invites you to join in our celebration of 150 years of intercollegiate competition. Throughout the 2002-03 academic year, Harvard will hold discussions on the history, current state, and future of college athletics. On Friday, November 22, Dr. James Shulman, of the Mellon Foundation, and Harvard Law Professor Hal Scott will be on campus for a discussion relating to the research and conclusions of the book, The Game of Life. In addition to the two principle speakers, Bates Athletic Director Suzanne Coffey, along with former Harvard Athletic Director Bill Cleary '56, will comment on the issues raised by the book. The event will be held at the Harvard Business School campus in Spangler Auditorium beginning at 3:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Senior Katie Scott (Mendham, NJ/Winthrop House) is one of three Ivy League players selected to participate in the 2002 National Field Hockey Coaches Association Division I Senior All-Star game. The game is set for November 23, and will be played on the campus of the University of Louisville, the site of this year's National Championship game. Scott, a First Team All-Ivy performer in 2001, has anchors a stingy Crimson defense that has posted eight shutouts.

For the second year in a row, senior sailor Clay Bischoff (Miami,FL/Eliot House) has won the New England Men's Singlehanded Championship. The regatta was held Oct. 26-27 at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. A two-time All-American, Bischoff dominated the regatta by winning nine out of 18 races and finished with a low-point total of 45. Bischoff bested 17 other competitors, and the win qualified him for the Intercollegiate Sailing Association North American Singlehanded Championship in Houston on November 8-10. At North Americans, Bischoff was accompanied by his teammate, freshman Vincent Porter (Winnetka, IL). Porter finished in third place, one point out of second. Incidentally, the co-ed sailing team is third in the Sailing World Collegiate rankings that were released October 1.

The ECAC and NESN have announced an eight-game men's ice hockey TV schedule, with the Crimson scheduled to appear in Friday, January 31, when Brown visits the Bright Arena. The ECAC semifinals and finals from Albany, NY, will also be televised.

In a span of hours, both Yale and Stanford announced their decision to abandon their ''early decision'' admissions policies. Both schools concluded that the policy favors affluent families and pressures some students to apply to a college before they have fully weighed its pros and cons. They may replace it with an ''early action'' program, similar to Harvard, which would allow students to apply early but, not require them to enroll if accepted. Harvard has had an early action policy for better than two decades, has never offered binding early decisions.