With Penn all but wrapping up the league with its win on Tuesday night, there’s again a lot of talk on the message boards, in blogs, and in articles about how supposedly terrible the Ivy League is this season and how comparatively weak this Quaker team is. For Penn fans it’s undoubtedly fun to feed their superiority complex. For fans of the other schools, it’s a means of denigrating Penn’s dominance. But both sides are ignoring the cold reality of the facts, and it’s time to set the record straight.

Myth #1: The Ivy League is at some sort of low ebb
No, not even close. First of all, in the Academic Index Era that low ebb most definitely came in the 1980s, when weak teams won a doormat league and routinely got 15 or 16 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. The last 15 or so seasons of Ivy League hoops looks like a golden age compared to that period. As for post-Dark Ages seasons, CollegeRPI.com’s archives extend back to the 1993-94 season. As I cited in a response to a comment on a blog entry last week, here are the league’s conference RPI rankings since then:

1993-94: 27
1994-95: 30
1995-96: 21
1996-97: 16
1997-98: 20
1998-99: 26
1999-00: 28
2000-01: 28
2001-02: 13
2002-03: 23
2003-04: 27
2004-05: 18
2005-06: 24

The Ivy League’s average ranking is 23.2. It is 24th this year, which is slightly below average. If you’re looking for the absolute nadir, that would be 1994-95. That was the year the Ivy League finished 30th in the nation in RPI, ahead of dreadful SoCon, SWAC, MEAC, and American West conferences who had a combined non-conference record of 52-256 good for a .169 winning percentage. 2000-01 was also far, far worse than this season, and 1993-94, 1999-00, and 2003-04 also saw much weaker leagues. It’s blatant hyperbole to characterize the league as any worse than “below average” or “slightly down” this season.

Myth #2: The Ivy League is caught in an overall downward trend
If you’re talking a one-year trend from last year to this year, perhaps. But seeing as that last season represented one of the strongest performances by the league in the A.I. Era, and two of the three seasons before that were above the mean, it’s ridiculous to argue any sort of longterm trend. The data clearly shows a sine wave-like pattern of ups and downs, with no discernable upward or downward trend. As I said to the reader who suggested that this ranking somehow didn’t capture the league’s decline relative to its Division I peers, either he is ignoring the facts in this case, or the level of play in Division I has gone down across the board. Either way, this argument is full of hot air.

Myth #3: If it wins the title, this will be Fran Dunphy’s weakest Ivy championship squad
Not to pick on SportsProf, but he’s the latest to claim this in his blog entry yesterday. Even if you ignore the 1995-96 team that split the title with Princeton, that’s still not remotely true. According to CollegeRPI.com, if Penn wins its remaining seven games, the Quakers have a projected RPI ranking of 64th. Let’s see how that compares to past Ivy champions, using the old RPI for the sake of consistency:

1993-94: 57th
1994-95: 73rd
1995-96: 113th
1998-99: 52nd
1999-00: 74th
2001-02: 36th
2002-03: 59th
2004-05: 81st

Unfortunately, CollegeRPI.com doesn’t have a projected old RPI for this season. Penn’s current rank in the old RPI formula is 77th — over 20 spots ahead of its rank of 98th using the new formula. So a conservative estimate would be an RPI rank of somewhere between 55th to 60th and a liberal estimate would be somewhere in the 45th-to-50th range using the old formula. We’ll have to wait to find out where it actually ends up, but we can use the conservative estimate for the sake of his exercise.

As you can see, if the Quakers win out and the projection is accurate, this Penn team would be on the same level as the 1993-94, 1998-99, and 2002-03 Penn teams. And as for the “weakest Penn title team” nonsense, the RPI would suggest there are four teams well below this one: 1994-95, 1995-96, 1999-00, and 2004-05. There’s simply no factual basis for the argument that this is one of Dunphy’s weaker title teams — let alone teams overall as some have suggested.