The Ivy League conference sponsors championships in 33 men's and women's sports and averages 35 varsity teams at each of its eight universities.

The women's archery team became a varsity sport at Barnard in 1978[7] and was absorbed into the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium when Columbia College became co-educational in 1983.

Columbia also fields a club-level archery team for male archers and female students interested in learning the sport.

[12] The 1933 edition of the Lions won an unofficial national championship by upsetting the top-ranked Stanford Indians 7–0 in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day 1934.

Between 1983 and 1988, a period of financial instability for New York City and Columbia University, the Lions lost 44 games in a row.

[13] Pro Football Hall of Famer Sid Luckman played his college ball at Columbia, graduating in 1938.

Perhaps the most famous personality associated with Lions football was a running back who had limited success on the field: the writer Jack Kerouac left school and went on the road after one injury-marred season at Columbia.

Another Lions back who became legendary for his accomplishments off the gridiron was baseball great Lou Gehrig, who was a two-sport star at Columbia.

Columbia and Cornell play for the Empire Cup, emblematic for Ivy League supremacy in New York State.

Lou Gehrig played college baseball at Columbia (he joined the New York Yankees in 1923, after his sophomore season) as well as Hall of Fame inductee Eddie Collins.

In 1939 the first live televised sporting event in the United States, was a Columbia versus Princeton baseball game, broadcast from Baker Field in New York City.

[15][16] Other Columbia Lions who have gone on to play in Major League Baseball include Gene Larkin and Fernando Perez.

The team plays at Hal Robertson Field at Phillip Satow Stadium, located at the northern tip of Manhattan.

[18] The 1951 team is, however, sadly best known for the tragic story of its brilliant but troubled star forward Jack Molinas, who eventually ended up in prison for crimes related his longtime involvement with gambling and who was murdered in 1975 in what appeared to be an organized crime-related assassination.

[18] The Lions have only won the official Ivy League championship once, in 1968, when they reached the "Sweet Sixteen" in the NCAA national tournament.

In 1979, the diminutive point guard Alton Byrd won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award, given to the best player under 6 feet (180 cm) in height.

The women's basketball team joined the Ivy League in 1986–1987, and for many years were a perennial cellar dweller, reaching their low point in 1994–1995, when they went 0–26.

[19][20] Dieter Ficken was named NSCAA Coach of the Year in 1983 after the Lions' 1–0 double-overtime finals loss to seven-time champion Indiana University.

Columbia had a team organized already during the 1896–97 season and during the 1897–98 campaign the university appeared in the Intercollegiate Hockey Association (IHA) alongside teams from Yale, Brown, and University of Pennsylvania,[27] and the school was continuously represented in organized ice hockey league games against other Ivy League institutions (Yale, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Cornell) up until the mid-1910s.