A by-the-numbers Friday night turned into an upside-down Saturday, with a number of shocking final scores. With the two-time champs losing on their first swing through the Ivies for the first time in two years and the league looking strong from top to bottom, it appears like we might have a bona fide race on our hands for the first time in a while.
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| 1. | Yale (9-10, 5-1 Ivy) | 3 | After four seasons of disappointing underachievement, the Bulldogs took a major step toward contending for the Ivy title for the first time since their watershed 2001-02 season. Now Yale has to show it can do the one thing that has kept it out of contention all those years: win on the road. |
| 2. | Penn (12-8, 3-1 Ivy) | 1 | The free throw shooting had been spotty all season, but it hadn’t really hurt the Quakers until Saturday, when an 8-for-21 night at the line cost them a game. Even if they end up back in the tournament, this is looking like the latest senior-led Penn team to fall short of expectations. |
| 3. | Cornell (11-9, 4-2 Ivy) | 2 | Steve Donahue’s freshmen got an important lesson in what is required of them on these Ivy League road weekends when they dropped a shocker at Harvard on Saturday. Now instead of being tied for first, the Big Red is a loss away from no longer controlling its own destiny. |
| 4. | Columbia (12-8, 3-3 Ivy) | 8 | The Lions took a big step in the right direction with a road sweep of Harvard and Dartmouth to get back to .500 in the league. The weekend began with Friday’s unconscious first-half shooting display and ended with a pair of clutch three-pointers late in Saturday’s game. |
| 5. | Harvard (10-10, 3-3 Ivy) | 5 | You won’t find many transformations as dramatic as what Harvard underwent this weekend. After getting embarrassed by a struggling Columbia squad on Friday, the Crimson looked like a completely different team in its upset of red-hot Cornell the following night. |
| 6. | Brown (7-14, 2-4 Ivy) | 7 | It’s a shame the Bears don’t hit the boards every game like they did on Saturday against Princeton. If Brown were to develop some semblance of an inside game to go along with its perimeter attack of Mark McAndrew and Damon Huffman, this team could be interesting. |
| 7. | Dartmouth (7-12, 2-4 Ivy) | 6 | There’s a fine line between playing tenacious defense and getting overly aggressive, and Dartmouth has yet to find the balance. The Big Green ranks 317th nationally in opponent free throw rate, and that sort of excessive fouling is the main reason it has lost five of six. |
| 8. | Princeton (9-9, 0-4 Ivy) | 4 | After the encouraging 9-4 start to the season had people thinking the program was back on track, the wheels have come off completely for Princeton. Saturday’s game was a new low, as a Brown team in its first season in a new system had little problem breezing by the Tigers. |
