December 25 Power Rankings

This was the week of Ivies versus the big boys, with three games against Big East opponents and one against a Pac-10 power. Two of them predictably ended with the Ivy team on the business end of a blowout, but two were respectably close. This is particularly noteworthy in that it wasn’t Penn playing these teams close.

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1. Penn (3-4) 1 The Quakers depart the mainland after the exam break with a tough game at Hawai’i and a possible trap game at BYU-Hawai’i awaiting them. Playing great teams close is nice, but it’s been almost a month since Penn actually won a game.
2. Columbia (6-3) 3 Playing against a team with a talented front line, Columbia held its own, making Notre Dame sweat in a respectable loss. But Joe Jones’s squad can’t keep the other team off the free throw line, which effectively cost it a chance at the upset.
3. Harvard (8-4) 2 The game against Boston College in Chestnut Hill turned out to be a mismatch, as the Eagles pummeled the Cusworth-less Crimson. But the home win on Tuesday over Colgate guaranteed Harvard no worse than an 8-5 record outside the league.
4. Yale (5-5) 5 The Bulldogs showed some good fight, rallying past a tenacious Navy team at home on Tuesday, before playing Providence tough. The rebounding against the Friars was particularly impressive: 41.9 percent offensively and 80.0 percent on defense.
5. Cornell (4-6) 7 Nothing like a blowout win to get a team feeling better about itself after an embarrassment like the Bucknell game. Even if it was against a very weak opponent in Army, suddenly things are looking up going into the West Coast swing.
6. Brown (2-7) 5 It’s tough to know which loss was worse: falling to a historically terrible UMES program at the buzzer, or seeing Luke Ruscoe go down with an injury. The Navy game was disappointing, but flukish in that a Middie had the game of his life.
7. Princeton (2-7) 8 The fact that Princeton got drubbed on a neutral court by a 4-4 Stanford team and still moved up a spot tells you just how bad the bottom of the league is. Two more halves of 20 or fewer points brings the total to nine in 18 halves on the season.
8. Dartmouth (1-6) 6 Quinnipiac made the Big Green look totally disorganized in a televised game on Wednesday. Then just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Dartmouth got completely pounded by 31 points on its home floor by a Vermont team Harvard beat.

Jake Wilson

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Basketball U.

Jake Wilson wrote 754 posts

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