It's not very often that I get to watch Ivy League basketball here in California, so when I heard that Princeton would be playing Harvard on ESPNU in a battle for first place in the Ivy League, I marked it on my calendar. I'd seen a few Ivy League teams play non-conference games earlier in the year (Princeton played at Duke in November also on ESPNU, for example), but those games are rarely competitive and don't really do a good job in showing the country what Ivy basketball is all about. Princeton's game against Harvard earlier this evening, however, was a different story, and I'm glad I made sure to watch it.
While, compared to football and baseball, basketball's not really my sport, and whereas I'm much more of a pro sports fan than a college one, there's really nothing better than the Ivy League hoops season. Maybe it's the way each member of the conference is so unique - different personalities, different playing styles, different stereotypes, different school colors. Maybe it's the gyms, each one with its own unique character and charm (and there's no better place to watch a game than Penn's Palestra). Maybe it's the simplicity of the schedule - the league's eight teams are divided into four travel pairs, and each weekend you either host a pair or visit a pair. You play each team twice (once home, once away) for a total of fourteen conference games - very easy to follow. I always group the schools the way the Ivy League season does - while most people put Harvard and Yale together, any Ivy hoops fan knows that Harvard goes with Dartmouth, Yale with Brown, Cornell with Columbia and Princeton with Penn.
Or, maybe it's the surprisingly good quality of basketball. While, even after Cornell's superb run to the Sweet Sixteen last season, most people don't associate the Ivy League with anything more than a 15-seed and a first round exit, true fans know better. The schedule is competitive - the back to back games (every Friday and Saturday night) make winning consistently a challenge, especially on the road - and the teams are tougher than they get credit for. Sure, there are always a few duds in the bunch, and a couple teams (Dartmouth, mainly) are never good. But Harvard has beaten Boston College and Colorado this year, Princeton took down Rutgers and Tulsa, and Yale downed BC too. If you watched the game tonight, you wouldn't be shocked - both teams showed the ability to hit shots from the outside, work the ball into the post, play solid defense and, most impressively, hustle for forty minutes.
I've given the Stanford basketball fans a lot of crap recently, and that will only increase after watching the Princeton game tonight. Even on TV, you could tell the crowd of 4,148 was full (by Jadwin Gym standards / capacity, anyway) and loud. Late in the game, with the Tigers at the free throw line to ice what would be a 65-61 victory, the fans were dead silent. After Princeton's Ian Hummer sank his shots to win it, the crowd erupted in impressive fashion. Watching it unfold made me proud not only to be a Tiger alum, but to be in any way associated with the Ivy League.
I'm excited to watch the rest of the fourteen-game regular season unfold; at 3-0, Princeton is tied with Penn atop the Ivy League standings. The Ivy is the only conference without a postseason tournament to determine its automatic NCAA berth, so every single conference game is critical. I really, really hope Princeton wins the league and makes it back to the Tournament this year, but I'll pull for whichever Ivy League school represents the conference against the big boys of college basketball.
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