Get schooled.
It seems there are two distinct types of Penn-Princeton games: exciting, down-to-the-wire thrillers and boring, one-sided affairs. There is rarely any middle ground. Last night’s contest at The Palestra definitely fits into the latter category. Usually there are one or two memorable plays that stay with you, but it’s hard to come up with a single one from last night.
Usually Penn-Princeton games decide Ivy championships. Tonight’s game will determine whether we have a race or a coronation this season. The Tigers are the league’s only hope to avoid a repeat of last year’s runaway Ivy title for the Quakers. With Cornell and Yale both three games behind in the loss column, they’re essentially both eliminated with a Penn win tonight. Even Princeton is probably done with a loss, as the Tigers would be two games out with seven to play, and it’s hard enough to imagine Penn going 5-2 in the second swing through the league, let alone Princeton running the table.
A few weeks ago you could have gotten pretty good odds on Princeton being 5-1 coming into tomorrow night’s clash with Penn. But after receiving the kinds of breaks they didn’t get last season when they started 1-5, the Tigers have undergone a pretty miraculous resuscitation in league play.
Tonight’s Princeton-Harvard tilt at Lavietes Pavilion will make the winner an Ivy contender — at least for one night — and will almost certainly kill the loser’s chances of getting in the Ivy title chase. It’s the one truly intriguing matchup of the evening, as the other three teams still realistically alive all play teams with four or more league losses already.
The first 14-Game Tournament piece this season comes from a statistical analysis of confence tourney results in one-bid conferences by Michael James. In looking at his numbers, one thing absolutely stood out: the benefit to the league in avoiding a 15 or 16 seed. As it turns out, an upset of the champion in a conference tournament would almost always relegate the league representative to a dreaded matchup with a 1 or 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.