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Give Felisha Legette-Jack a lot of credit. The first-year Syracuse women’s coach brought a power-conference team into John J. Lee Amphitheater to do battle with Yale.
And the Orange escaped with a 60-58 win.
Yale (4-5) dominated the first half, building a 17-8 lead by the 3:53 mark, holding Syracuse (6-2) to 3-for-16 shooting from the field and converting on three of trey attempts. Yale controlled the tempo and forced Syracuse into a slower style of play.
It had been 77 years since Yale men’s basketball last started a season 6-0.
Until Tuesday night.
Yale defeated Vermont 73-44, performing a 46-14 demolition of the Catamounts in the second half at John J. Lee Amphitheater to improve to 6-0 and move forward as the Ivy League’s only undefeated team.
The Bulldogs were down 30-27 at the half. They came out in the second stanza with a renewed intensity on both ends.
”I have a really good staff. Everyone made good suggestions (at halftime),” coach James Jones said. “We cut off the post.”
Yale sank seven of 11 field goals to start the second half on a 20-5 run, building a 47-35 lead with 11:58 remaining. Vermont answered with a three, but Yale topped that with seven straight subsequent points to lead 54-38 with 10:32 left.
Yale shot 61.3% in the second half while holding Vermont to a paltry 21.7%.
Junior forward Matt Knowling once again led Yale with 22 points on 10-for-13 shooting. Sophomore guard John Poulakidas and senior forward EJ Jarvis each pitched in 10 points.
Vermont fell to an uncharacteristic 1-5.
Quincy Jones, son of James Jones, hit a half-court shot to win a TV during a game timeout.
Yale’s KenPom ranking is No. 105 after the win. Princeton is the closest Ivy to Yale at No. 136.
The Bulldogs’ next action comes at Colorado on Sunday. It will be a homecoming of sorts for Jalen Gabbidon, who captained Yale last season and now starts for the Buffaloes.
The Princeton tree continues to sprout women’s basketball coaches in the Ivy League.
Yale named Princeton assistant Dalila Eshe as the 11th head coach in program history Monday. Eshe replaces Allison Guth, now head coach at Loyola Chicago.
Former Tiger assistants are now the head coaches at Yale, Harvard (Carrie Moore) and Columbia (Megan Griffith).
And it makes sense.
The Tigers are as close to a dynasty as one might find in the corridors of the Ancient Eight. Princeton won Ivy titles in 2018, 2019 and 2022, the last three years that the title has been contested, and have gone 40-2 during that period in the Ivy.
Eshe impressed at her opening presser today at John J. Lee Amphitheater. She gave immediate kudos to Yale president Peter Salovey, an American social psychologist who Eshe could identify with as a former college psychology major. She also credited Yale athletic director Vicky Chun and deputy athletic director Ann-Marie Guglieri on a very professional search.
“It is an honor and a dream come true to accept this position,” Eshe said, adding that the Bulldogs “will pride ourselves on putting in the work to win championships.”
Eshe comes to Yale from Princeton where she spent three seasons as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator, helping Princeton to a No. 24 national ranking and a NCAA Tournament first-round win over favored Kentucky.
The Tallahassee, Fla. native was a WNBA player with the Washington Mystics and Atlanta Dream and coached at Loyola Maryland, East Carolina and La Salle before her stop at Princeton. She knows talent when she sees it, having secured La Salle’s first-ever top 100 recruit. During her recruiting tenure at Princeton, the Tigers boasted three consecutive top-40 classes.
Eshe made it clear that she is a defense-first coach who also values the significance of a top-flight post presence like 6-foot-5 Yale junior Camilla Emsbo. Eshe knows her well, having coached her twin sister Kira at Princeton. The new Yale coach values post players who “can stretch out.”
The Florida alumna noted that in her first meeting with her new team on Tuesday night, team members urged her to help with community outreach to bolster women’s basketball attendance at Yale. Eshe also recognizes that the league has been, and can be in the future, a two-bid NCAA conference. With that in mind, Eshe wants to play a challenging yet realistic out-of-conference schedule.
Yale returns Emsbo and a large part of the squad which compiled a 16-11 record and a 9-5 mark in the Ivy this past season before falling in the Ivy League Tournament to Columbia.
On an emotionally charged Senior Night, Yale took care of business and defeated Brown in a Saturday night showdown, 74-65, at John J. Lee Amphitheater.
Four Yale seniors, Azar Swain, captain Jalen Gabbidon, Eze Dike and Jameel Alausa, played their last home games for the Bulldogs. Dike started after not playing this calendar year due to injury.
“I thought we played a better brand of Yale basketball,” coach James Jones said in comparing the performance to the efforts against Dartmouth and Cornell on the road last week. Jones captured his 350th career win. It was also his 191st Ivy League win, moving him ahead of former Penn coach Fran Dunphy into second place all-time in league history behind only Pete Carril.
Mitch Henderson is now into his second decade as skipper of the Princeton Tigers. Going into Saturday’s crucial meeting with the Yale Bulldogs, the only Ivy team to defeat the Tigers in Jadwin Gym, this season, Henderson had amassed 180 wins against 106 losses.
But the Tigers have struggled against James Jones’ Bulldogs, losing seven straight to them heading into their latest clash.
It was a big game for both teams, but it was arguably even bigger for Yale.
The inconsistent Bulldogs sat at 6-3 and Columbia at 7-1 in Ivy play entering Saturday’s fray. Yale very much wanted to separate from Harvard and avoid the Columbia season sweep.
Feb. 26, 2016 was a long time ago – so long ago that no member of the Yale men’s basketball team was even enrolled at Yale.
It was just another day at the office for James Jones and crew – until it wasn’t.
It would be logical to expect that Yale would be down at the half to the high-flying Cornell offense if Azar Swain did not score.
The Dartmouth at Yale women’s game postponed from its original Jan. 7 date has been rescheduled.