Who do you think Columbia’s rival is? I’ve seen other threads like this, and a lot of people say Penn, but that doesn’t make sense since Penn’s famous for its rivalry with Princeton. A few other people have said things like Brown and Cornell, so I just wanted to get more points of views. I know Columbia isn’t that much of a “sporty” school, but for the alumni who actually go to some of the sporting events, who would you consider it to be? Or, who is their academic rival? Thanks!
The reality is that not every school is involved in a notable rivalry. If you have to ask about a school’s top rival, then maybe it doesn’t have one.
If a school is involved in a classic rivalry – like Harvard-Yale, Williams-Amherst, or Lehigh-Lafayette – then typically there will be a Big Rivalry Game scheduled for the last week of the football regular season, as a climax. By that standard, Columbia’s rival must be Brown, because in recent years they have always played Brown as their final football opponent. I don’t actually think that Columbia and Brown are big rivals though, they probably just got stuck with each other after the other Ivies paired off.
The Big Rivalry Game isn’t necessarily football, if a school has some other “signature sport”. For example, it could be the final game of the basketball season (North Carolina-Duke) or the final game of the lacrosse season (Johns Hopkins-Maryland). Columbia’s "signature sport"is fencing (they won the 2015 and 2016 NCAA championships). So their rival must be NYU, which is also located on Manhattan and is similarly noted for academics and fencing. Here’s confirmation from the NYU perspective:
http://www.nyunews.com/2016/09/20/nyu-vs-columbia-is-the-most-lukewarm-rivalry-you-could-imagine/
Columbia’s rivalry is not athletic. It’s NYU, competing for good students in NYC.
Columbia loses a loooot of it’s games . … .
It’s other peer schools are Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc.
Honestly Columbia is lousy at most major sports and is not at all a sports oriented school. The school plays all the Ivy teams annually but I don’t see Columbia as having a sports rival.
Ivy League rivalries are mild at best. Even Harvard-Yale pales in comparison to the likes of Cal-Stanford, Duke-UNC, Alabama-Auburn, Texas-OSU, Army-Navy and of course, the mother lode, Michigan-Ohio.