Get schooled.
It wasn’t a particularly good week for the league, which went 2-6 and saw Princeton and Cornell both suffer ugly losses. Penn playing #3 Villanova tough was another pleasant surprise, but in the end Harvard was the only Ivy team to win this week.
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.
No two teams needed wins more than Brown and Princeton, and both teams got those victories on Saturday. Columbia got back in the win column as well, but struggled more than it should have at home against a weak Lafayette team. The only loss on the day was Harvard’s disappointing showing at Lehigh.