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Facing a typical foul-heavy Ivy Saturday night game and a boisterous crowd in Newman Arena, the Penn men survived a furious rally to defeat Cornell, 73-68. Adding the hard-fought victory to Friday’s more comfortable 81-66 win at Columbia, the Quakers have now won four games in a row and remain in sole possession of second place.
The Penn women broke a five-game losing streak and maintained a shot at the Ivy tournament with a 71-61 win Saturday over Cornell at the Palestra.
Brian Earl’s Cornell Big Red got sweet revenge Friday for the buzzer-beater loss suffered at Jadwin Gym a month ago.
As the calendar moves into February, we have reached the midpoint of the Ivy season. While this weekend brings the first back-to-back games of the season, Saturday night looks to be the more pivotal evening for the women’s division. Each game pits teams from the four tiers of the conference against one another.
The second meeting between the Tigers and the Big Red was a bigger blowout than the first. On Jan. 8, the Berube Brigade rolled over the Big Red in Ithaca, 65-41. This evening’s rematch at Jadwin Gym was a defensive tour de force for the Tigers as they held Cornell to 9.25 points per quarter while scoring 18.75 themselves.
As we near the halfway mark of the 2022 Ivy League season, here are five thoughts about the state of the race for the men’s league title:
Three weeks ago, the Cornell men lost to Princeton at the buzzer after leading by 18 with 16 minutes left. Sunday against Brown, the same thing nearly happened for the Big Red.
But this time, it ended differently.
After running out to a 24-point lead over the first 7:30 of the game, the Columbia women surprisingly found themselves in a battle with Cornell on Thursday night. In a typically intense physical battle between the Empire State rivals, the Lions used the offense of Kitty Henderson and the rebounding of Kaitlyn Davis to come away with a 57-46 victory at Levien Gymnasium.
With the win, the Light Blue are 3-0 in league play (12-0 overall) for the first time in program history and remain tied with Princeton for first place. For the Red, the defeat was their first of the year when holding an opponent to 60 points or less and they are now 1-3 in the conference (6-9 overall).
ESPN was the first to report the postponement of Monday’s men’s and women’s Columbia-Cornell games on Sunday afternoon, but no reason was given and the changes had not been updated to the individual team’s websites. A representative from Cornell Athletics informed Ivy Hoops Online that both contests would be postponed due to a winter storm expected to hit the northeast from Sunday night until Monday.
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.