The college basketball offseason is always rife with change, but this summer felt like a particularly tumultuous one in the Ivy League. The exit of the dean of Ivy coaches back in April was a sign of things to come, as coaching staff and roster changes were widespread. In the first installment of a four-part series recapping this summer’s developments, we’ll begin by taking a look at the top news stories of the summer.
No story garnered bigger headlines this year than the Keenan Jeppesen saga. After an impressive sophomore Ivy League campaign last season, the Second Team All-Ivy performer attempted to follow his coach, Glen Miller, to Penn. What actually transpired between the two schools and between Penn’s athletic and admissions departments is unknown, but the net result was a denial of admission to Penn. However, the story then took a bizarre turn, as the Penn athletic department, the Penn coaches, and supposedly even Jeppesen himself found out about the decision via a very ill-advised interview granted to the Daily Pennsylvanian by Penn dean of admissions Lee Stetson. The article hit the web the morning of July 20, and later that day, Penn sports information director Mike Mahoney took the unusual step of discussing the matter in a post to Basketball U.’s Penn message board. In the end, Jeppesen was left to repair what we can only assume were some rather charred bridges back on College Hill in Providence and return to Brown.
Brown also was in the news for other reasons this summer, as Jeppesen and his teammates find themselves with a new coach this year. Former Princeton standout Craig Robinson was hired to succeed Miller at Brown. We’ll discuss the hire in greater detail in the second part of this series, which will take a look at changes to Ivy League coaching staffs.
Word of Penn guard David Whitehurst‘s academic ineligibility had been circulating on back channels all summer long. Just one week after breaking the Jeppesen news, the Daily Pennsylvanian went public with the Whitehurst story, reporting that the rising junior had in fact been “dismissed from the university for academic reasons.” Part three of the summer review series will examine roster changes, and we’ll discuss further the loss of Whitehurst.
Cornell got an early start on its 2008 recruiting class when USC transfer Collin Robinson decided to continue his education in Ithaca. Robinson put up gaudy scoring numbers as a high school senior in Southern California, but didn’t play much as a freshman at USC under Tim Floyd. He decided to transfer in the spring after Floyd notified him that his scholarship would not be renewed for 2006-07. After sitting out this season as per NCAA transfer regulations, Robinson will have three years of eligibility remaining at Cornell.
In August, several Ivy League big men honed their skills at the legendary Pete Newell Big Man Camp. Columbia’s John Baumann and Jason Miller, Cornell’s Andrew Naeve, and Harvard’s Brian Cusworth were among the college players who trekked to Las Vegas for instruction from the former Cal coach.
Also of note, last year seven of the eight Ivy athletic departments relied on CSTV to power their athletics websites, with Penn the lone holdout after switching to XOS a couple years earlier. Columbia and Princeton jumped ship to XOS in early July, Harvard joined them in August, and Dartmouth soon followed suit with a new website at a new URL, dartmouthsports.com, in September. The mass exodus sparked rumors of a league-wide Internet video package, but a number of sources around the league indicate nothing league-wide is in the works at this point for the 2006-07 season. However, it’s likely that at least some of the Ivies will work out reciprocity agreements to include at least some Ivy road games in their Internet video packages.
And finally, Penn fans took note of several uniform number changes when the 2006-07 roster was updated on the athletics website. The reason behind this? New uniforms. After years of wearing And1 — a company founded by Penn alumni — Miller has signed a deal with Nike. Brown fans will recall that Miller’s Bears wore Nike until switching to adidas several years back when the school severed its relationship with Nike over concerns about labor conditions at the company’s factories.
