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 gut feeling
The various Dens of Iniquity in Vegas have Penn as a 14- to 15-point favorite tonight. That’s certainly a reasonable expectation based on the way the two teams have performed this season. Penn enters the game ranked in the Top 100 by all three major ratings services, while Princeton is in the Bottom 100 in all three. The two rivals have played nine games against common opponents. Penn is 8-1 in those games with an average margin of +19.9. Princeton is 5-4 with an average margin of -0.6. Even with the Tigers improved in Ivy play, the Quakers still own a +23.8 to +5.3 edge in average margin. Penn has a size and talent advantage and by all metrics the Quakers should roll in their home arena. But I’ve just got this hunch it won’t happen like that. I see Princeton coming out on fire from the outside, frustrating Penn with the matchup zone, and leading at halftime. I’m not sure how it eventually ends, but I’ve just got this feeling it won’t be with Penn winning by 14 or 15.
New Prince board off to a poor start
Unless the online edition of the Daily Princetonian is missing content from the print edition today, the new sports editors dropped the ball in a big way. First all, there is no article on tonight’s Princeton-Penn contest. Apparently a piece on the biggest game of the season to this point for the Ivy League and both programs didn’t rate as high in the editors’ minds as articles on the squash, diving, women’s tennis, and men’s volleyball teams. The only mentions of the game in the online edition of the paper are the annual trashtalk columns, where the Prince column basically concedes basketball to Penn and opts to talk about everything except the point of the article: men’s basketball. This approach might have made at least a little sense a month ago when Princeton looked like an Ivy League doormat. But the Tigers are just a game behind the Quakers right now and can pull into a first-place tie with a win tonight. Why even bother to do this column exchange around a basketball game if you’re going to write something like that?
