Get schooled.
Cornell gets on the bus this weekend for what has to be the school’s biggest road trip since a 7-1 Big Red team headed east to face Harvard and second-place Dartmouth 19 years ago. Princeton’s disastrous Ivy campaign makes the trip look much less menacing than in past years, but every Ivy team has at least one road loss after Round One of league play. What does this weekend mean for Cornell’s title hopes? In a word: everything.
With the preseason favorites sweeping its first road weekend and with five teams already saddled with two or more league losses, the chances of an exciting Ivy League race may hinge Saturday’s Penn-Yale tilt at Lee Amphitheater. Of course, in order for that game to maximum importance, the Bulldogs need to win on Friday night in against a desperate Princeton squad. After dropping a home game to a likely second-division team in Brown, this is the Yale’s shot at atonement. This week’s 14-Game Tournament takes a look at the upcoming action in New Haven.
Thanks to splits of the season series between both sets of travel partners, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale all enter this weekend at 1-1 in the league. With Friday and Saturday games looming in Boston and Hanover, there are four losses to go around. Obviously no one can lose more than twice, so at least two teams are going to find themselves with a dreaded second early Ivy loss.
Columbia and Cornell open their home-and-home series Saturday in Manhattan, and one of the teams is leaving Levien Gym with a costly second Ivy loss in January. Penn and Princeton don’t meet for the first time until February 13 and there’s a good chance their second meeting won’t matter for the fifth straight year. With the Tigers at 0-2 in the league, no travel partner season series should have as big an effect on the Ivy race as the one between the Cs. This week’s 14GT takes a look at the implications on the standings.
New York State is the setting for the first Ivy weekend of the season, with the Ps heading north to take on the Cs. This figures to be the toughest roadtrip of the Ivy season for Penn and Princeton, and it’s also a critical home weekend for young Columbia and Cornell squads if they want to make some noise this year. But just how important are these games?