Cornell men’s basketball had an opportunity to mount an improbable comeback against No. 18 Baylor on Tuesday but ultimately fell short, 98-79.
Baylor
Q&A with current Baylor and former Yale standout Makai Mason
You must remember him. That incredible 31-point performance for Yale in the 2016 NCAA Tournament is hard to forget.
Then injuries took hold and he only saw action for Yale in one game last season, at Harvard. Well, he made quite an impression on Baylor coach Scott Drew en route to those 31 points, and Mason is now integral to the Baylor offense as a fifth-year player. He is averaging 30.8 minutes and 13.2 points per game, having scored 18 points in two different games for the Bears so far this season. IHO caught up with him recently.
Yale’s Jordan Bruner out for season, Makai Mason to miss up to two months
As first reported by NBC Sports, Yale has lost sophomore forward Jordan Bruner and Yale senior guard Makai Mason to injury, Bruner for the entire season and Mason for up to two months.
Mason is reportedly dealing with a stress fracture in his right foot, the same foot that was broken in a scrimmage against Boston University before the start of the 2016-17 campaign, causing him to miss the entire season.
Mason was wearing a device in his shoe to take pressure off the area that he hurt last year, the New Haven Register reported, adding that he likely wound up putting more pressure on the rest of his foot, where he developed the stress fracture.
Yale to start 2017-18 season with a bang, won’t finish with a whimper
Defense and offensive rebounding have been the calling cards for Yale head basketball coach James Jones ever since his arrival in New Haven in 1999. Right now, he sits as the dean of Ivy basketball coaches, the winningest Yale coach in history and the only Yale coach to guide the Elis to an NCAA win, a victory over favored Baylor in Providence in 2016.
Last year, Yale finished at 18-11 and 9-5 in the Ivies and just a game away from another NCAA tourney. In the first season of the Ivy postseason tourney, the Elis won a thrilling game over Harvard before falling by 12 to Princeton at the Palestra as the Tigers capped a 16-0 run through Ivy competition.
Yale guard Makai Mason to transfer to Baylor for 2018-19 season
Makai Mason made a name for himself on a national level by posting 31 points in a NCAA Tournament Round of 64 win over Baylor in 2016, Yale’s first-ever win in the Big Dance.
Now Mason has decided that if you can beat ’em, join ’em.
Several sources announced Thursday that Mason would join Baylor as a graduate transfer in the 2018-19 season following one more season at Yale in 2017-18.
Jon Rothstein of FanRag Sports reported in February that Mason would play for the Elis in the 2017-18 season and become a graduate transfer following that season.
Mason was a standout during Yale’s NCAA Tournament run in 2016 but was injured in a scrimmage in November, reportedly needing to undergo surgery to repair his foot. Yale bowed out to Duke in the Round of 32 in the 2016 NCAA Tournament.
Tracking Yale’s rise to championship history
It would be easy to point back to last season’s heartbreaking collapse and say that this year’s title run started simmering from the moment Javier Duren’s runner rimmed out at the Palestra on March 14, 2015. Certainly, that would be a convenient starting point for this narrative of redemption that culminated in this year’s seeding upset of the Baylor Bears. But anyone who’s been following the Bulldogs knows that this journey towards a title to call our own started long before that.
How did we get here?
There have been countless close calls since James Jones took the reins back at the turn of the century: the three-way tiebreaker in ’02 with Penn and Princeton, the thrilling up-tempo ’07 squad led by Eric Flato and Casey Hughes that started 9-2, beating undefeated Penn and sparking the only (non-Princeton) court storming I’ve ever witnessed at John J. Lee, the dangerous Greg Mangano-Reggie Willhite-Austin Morgan trio that raced out to fast start in ’12. But it wasn’t until Justin Sears arrived in New Haven that following summer that Jones could finally build around a true superstar in blue. And while getting to the Promised Land required contributions from everyone on this year’s squad from Blake Reynolds to Khaliq Ghani to Makai Mason, this was clearly Sears’ team.
But first, let’s go back to where it all began, back to a time when Yale basketball conjured up images of January hope and February despair, not the March ecstasy that we’ve come to know.
No. 12 Yale outlasted by No. 4 Duke, 71-64
So very close.
No. 12 Yale came up just short in its bid for the first Sweet 16 appearance in program history, falling to No. 4 Duke, 71-64, in front of a pro-Yale partisan crowd at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence.
No. 12 Yale vs No. 4 Duke: What to watch for
Little did anyone expect Yale and Duke would meet for a second time after the Blue Devils handed Yale an 80-61 loss in November. But that exact scenario is taking place Saturday afternoon in Providence in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Duke beat Yale on that night, 80-61, but the game was much closer. Yale raced out to a 9-0 lead and trailed 38-36 at the half.
No. 12 Yale defeats No. 5 Baylor, 79-75, notches first NCAA Tournament win ever
Yale made history just by showing up. Then the Bulldogs made a whole lot more.
In Yale’s first NCAA Tournament game since 1962, the Bulldogs won their first contest in the tourney ever, besting the Bears, 79-75, after leading most of the way in front of a Yale partisan crowd at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence.