Elegy for the Killer Ps

Not so long ago, the Princeton Tigers and the Penn Quakers – the Killer Ps – ruled the realm of Ivy League men’s basketball.  

Followers of Ivy hoops are well aware of the history. From 1963 to 2007, either Penn or Princeton (and often both) won the Ivy League title with the exception of only two years – 1986 and 1988.

The two teams have played each other 231 times, the third longest rivalry in college basketball, with the all-time series as close as it could possibly be: Penn leads by a single win, 216-215.

Each program has earned 24 bids to the NCAA Tournament, with Princeton in its most recent bid making a historic run to the Sweet 16 in 2023. 

Penn and Princeton are the only teams in Ivy League history to advance to the Final Four.

The Orange and Black accomplished this herculean task in 1965 behind the play of the legendary Bill Bradley.

Penn made its Cinderella run to the Final Four in 1979, when the Quakers shocked the basketball world by beating Iona (coached by Jim Valvano), North Carolina (coached by Dean Smith), Syracuse (coached by Jim Boeheim), and St. John’s (coached by Lou Carnesecca), before bowing to eventual champion Michigan State.

Despite their legacy of Ivy League hegemony, the Killer Ps no longer appear to threaten the Ivy hierarchy.  

One need look no further than the results of this past weekend to appreciate how far the mighty Ps have fallen, when Penn and Princeton hit the road for back-to-back games at Brown and Yale. The longtime Ivy travel partners went a combined 0-for-4 against the Bears and Bulldogs for the first time since the 1956-57 season, when Dwight Eisenhower was president.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The demise of the Killer Ps has been a work in progress for the better part of the 21st century.  

Princeton has largely held up its end of the bargain in recent years, winning at least a share of eight Ivy League championships in the last 25 seasons, including the last three regular season titles. 

Penn has won seven titles this century, but only one in the past 18 years and none since 2018. The Quakers have fallen hard in recent years, failing last season to qualify for the Ivy League Tournament for the first time in program history.

This season, the Quakers received a vote of no confidence before the season started when Penn was picked to finish seventh in the Ivy League preseason media poll. Since then, the Quakers have “lived down” to expectations, losing seven of nine Ivy contests and sinking to, you guessed it, seventh place.

The Princeton Tigers were nearly unanimously chosen in the preseason media poll to finish first in the Ancient Eight after they came through the offseason largely unscathed by the mayhem known as the transfer portal. 

After flirting with a declaration for the NBA Draft, first-team All-Ivy sensation Xaivian Lee decided to return to Old Nassau for his junior campaign, as did Caden Pierce, the reigning Ivy League Player of the Year.

Despite having two superstars in his starting lineup, Princeton skipper Mitch Henderson has not been able to coax championship caliber play from his squad. Instead, this season’s version of Princeton men’s basketball is much less than the sum of its parts.

The Tigers displayed from the get-go that they were not up to the challenge of winning a rare, “four-peat” when they made a habit of falling behind virtually everybody they played in the nonconference by double-digits, including such non-luminaries as Iona, Duquesne, Wright State, Texas State and Merrimack. Even Kean College, a Division III program, led the Tigers more than eight minutes into a game at Jadwin Gymnasium earlier this season.

The Tigers famously clawed their way back to win several of those games, but in recent contests, including the double-digit losses suffered to Brown and Yale this past weekend, the Tigers barely challenged their opponents. 

At 5-4 in Ivy play so far this season, any chance of living up to preseason expectations has been flushed away in New Jersey. It’s even possible that Princeton could join Penn in missing out altogether on Ivy Madness this March, a result considered unthinkable at the beginning of the season.

What’s behind the demise of the Killer Ps?

There are various answers to this question depending on whether a short-term or long-term filter is applied.

In my view, the main reason behind the faltering of the Ps has more to do with what other programs have accomplished than with the absence of talent or a lack of will to win. Several Ivy programs, long dormant, have risen this century to challenge the Penn-Princeton duopoly.

It began with the ascendance of Cornell under the stewardship of then-coach Steve Donahue, who, ironically, now presides over the diminished Penn Quakers.  

Donahue built a juggernaut in Ithaca that won back-to-back-to-back Ivy titles in 2008, 2009 and 2010. In 2010, the Big Red made a run to the Sweet 16 as a No. 12 seed after upsetting Temple and Wisconsin in the NCAA Tournament.

After Cornell’s Ivy reign, the Harvard Crimson ascended under the leadership of Tommy Amaker. Until 2011, Harvard was the only Ivy program to never win a league title, but the hiring of Amaker heralded a newly aggressive and controversial approach to recruiting at Cambridge.

Amaker succeeded in recruiting top-end talent and dominated the league for nearly a decade, winning five consecutive Ivy titles from 2011 to 2015 and seven championships overall, including shared titles in 2018 and 2019.

The biggest threat to the Penn-Princeton duopoly in recent years has been the rise of the Yale Bulldogs under the leadership of the indomitable James Jones.  

Prior to Jones’s arrival in New Haven in 1999, Yale had not won a share of an Ivy League title since 1963. But in Jones’s 25 seasons at the helm, the Bulldogs have won six regular season conference championships, with a seventh virtually assured this season.

Jones has succeeded in recruiting talent more consistently than any Ivy coach over the past 10 years. He also understands how to coach his team to play defense like no other program in the Ivy League.  

Although Princeton has challenged Yale in recent years, the reality is that Jones’s Bulldogs have dominated Henderson’s Tigers, winning 13 of their last 16 matchups. 

With more than 400 wins already under his belt, Jones is likely to break Pete Carril’s record of 514 wins as an Ivy League coach.

Beyond the rise of other Ivy programs, some followers of Ivy hoops lament what they see as a lack of consistent recruiting success in recent years, particularly at Penn. But Donahue has scored big recruiting wins in luring star players like Jordan Dingle, AJ Brodeur and Tyler Perkins to don the Red and Blue. Unfortunately for Donahue, some of his recruits have turned out to be too successful, as Dingle and Perkins have bolted in successive years for “greener” pastures.

This had led Donahue to try something rarely seen in the Ivy League: dipping into the transfer portal. During the 2024 off-season, Donahue recruited three transfers to Penn, including Ethan Roberts, the fourth leading scorer in the Ivy League this season at just under 18 points per game. However, the early results of this experiment of using the portal to rebuild cannot be deemed a success with Penn headed for another losing season and sporting a NET ranking of 310 out of 364 teams.

At Princeton, the story is somewhat different. Henderson and his staff have succeeded in bringing in top players and mostly holding onto them. Princeton famously nabbed perhaps the greatest Ivy League player of the century so far, Tosan Evbuomwan, because associate head coach Brett MacConnell had the guile to follow up on an email from England touting the talents of a British hoopster with a funny sounding last name. 

Henderson also recruited Lee and Pierce, and so far has managed to convince both of them to stay at Princeton. 

But after leading the Tigers to an undisputed regular season championship last year, there were rumors that Henderson would land a lucrative head coaching job at a high major program. Vacancies at Stanford and Vanderbilt seemed like compatible destinations for Henderson, and a contract at either school could have involved a contract worth tens of millions.  

In the end, both Stanford and Vanderbilt went in a different direction, and Henderson returned to Princeton, along with his star players, Pierce and Lee. 

But something was off this season for both the coach and his star players. As Princeton continued to play lethargically, especially against less-talented opponents, the coach seemed at a loss to come up with answers.  

Were the players and their head coach disappointed that offseason possibilities never materialized? Was there complacency? In a game and business as competitive as college basketball, even the slightest distraction can make the difference between winning and losing.

In the long run, both Penn and Princeton continue to be well-positioned to compete for future Ivy League titles. The enduring legacy of success at both programs, combined with the high quality of education offered on both campuses, is likely to continue to attract high end talent.   

In the short run, there are rumblings that Donahue’s tenure at Penn is nearing an end. If so, that would mean that Penn is at an inflection point. The next coaching hire could make or break a program that hasn’t seen sustained success for nearly a decade.

At Princeton, the immediate future seems brighter. So long as Henderson stays at the helm, the Orange and Black are likely to remain competitive and relevant, though questions will soon begin to swirl as to whether Pierce and Lee are likely to return to Princeton for their senior years.

Regardless of whether there are coaching changes or players transferring in and out, one fact remains true: The era of the Killer Ps is over. Long live the Killer Ps.