Get schooled.
This weekend it was the Ivy League’s two most famous brands carrying the banner for the league on the hardwood with a pair of easy victories. Princeton suffered another under-20 half after a good first half at Wake and lost by 19, while Dartmouth couldn’t recover from a huge early deficit against a good Hofstra team at The Garden. And then there was Cornell getting pantsed at Bucknell…
So there’s this entity. Its modern incarnation was birthed largely due to the efforts of an iconic leader, who continues to cast a long shadow — long after his departure. This leader had instituted a rigid system of rules and control, and after he was out of the picture, a “reform” movement began that sought to liberalize the entity. However, recently a hardliner has assumed control and many of the liberal reforms have been rolled back as part of a return to the orthodoxy.
The night after a dreadful shooting performance by Penn, Princeton found a way to one-up its rival with an ugly 21-point effort that tied an NCAA Division I record for fewest points in the shot clock era. Except Princeton did this against a 1-6 Monmouth team with its starting point guard injured and his backup suspended. The news was significantly better up in Boston, where Harvard’s win over Long Island was its first without the injured Brian Cusworth.
The Ivy League went 0-2 last night, but those losses couldn’t have been more different. While Penn was dropping a 14-0 run on third-ranked Villanova and giving the Wildcats their toughest game of the season, Dartmouth lost in Portland to a 2-6 Maine team playing without its best player.
Dartmouth and Penn kick off a fairly light week in Ivy hoops tonight. Look for the league’s composite record to remain at three games under .500 at the end of the night.