Home of the Roundball Poets
Brian Earl is no longer the coach of Cornell men’s basketball.
Just days after guiding the Big Red to their first NIT bid, Earl resigned to take the head coaching job at William & Mary. It seemingly came out of left field after Cornell finished 22-8 in its third consecutive winning season under him. After all, Earl’s never coached or played outside the Ivy League.
If you said that Cornell men’s basketball would score 105 points on Miami, an Elite 8 team from last season, you would have thought the Big Red would win, right?
You’d be wrong.
Trailing by 11 with under five minutes to go, a win seemed unlikely for the Cornell men against Delaware. But a 20-2 run to finish the game shocked the Blue Hens as the Big Red escaped with a 74-67 victory.
Cornell faced a Delaware squad just months removed from an NCAA Tournament appearance, and the team returned many key pieces. It’s a significant victory against a quality mid-major opponent.
Frankly, Cornell probably didn’t deserve to win that game. Delaware pushed a 10-0 run in the ensuing minutes before Cornell’s dramatic comeback. But it’s a telling victory.
Before commencing with the rest of the Ivy hoops roundup, a note of sorrow about the passing of James “Booney” Salters, the 1980 Penn grad whose dynamic scoring and passing made him one of the best guards in men’s program history.
Salters died July 7. He was 64.
Penn made the NCAA Tournament in all three of Salters’ three seasons with the Red & Blue. The Penn Athletics and Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Famer captained the often overlooked 1979-80 Penn team that advanced to the second round of the Big Dance, leading the squad in scoring and sinking the game-winning shot to triumph over Princeton, 50-49, in an Ivy League playoff matchup.
Featuring 18 contests against teams ranked in the top 150 and highlighted by trips to the Carrier Dome and the Bryce Jordan Center, the Cornell men’s basketball teams released its 2019-20 schedule on Thursday. The Big Red will attempt to develop their young squad over a 13-game nonconference schedule to again exceed expectations and return to the Ivy League Tournament after a one-year absence.
Following early games with Binghamton and Bryant, Cornell welcomes NJIT to Newman Arena on November 13. Last season, the Big Red defeated the Highlanders by six in Newark and look to make it two-in-a-row over the ASUN’s second best team. Three days later, the Red head to the midwest to take on DePaul of the Big East. This game would have had more intrigue had Bill Courtney remained on the Blue Demons’ staff, but the former Cornell head coach (2010-2016) left for Miami in June.
On November 20, Cornell heads up I-81 for its yearly trip to Syracuse. This year’s game will be third meeting between junior Jimmy Boeheim and his Hall of Fame father Jim, as well as the 125th overall between the nearby schools. Last year’s 63-55 loss was the 39th in a row, but the closest game against the Orange since 2005.
In a matchup between two of the league’s best teams, Yale was able to escape Ithaca with a 98-92 win in a game in which nobody really seemed to play much defense. Both teams shot 53 percent from the field and well over 40 percent from three. Yale moved up to 17-4 overall (7-1 Ivy) and Cornell dropped down to 13-11 (5-3) but still remain two games over fifth place in the league, with a Penn loss.