On Wednesday night, Cornell had its home opener against Colgate. Coming into the contest, the Red had lost its first two games against Binghamton and Siena. The Red Raiders arrived with a 0-1 record, courtesy of a 28 point loss to Syracuse. The game was the 128th meeting between the upstate New York rivals, and the first matchup between coach Brian Earl of Cornell and coach Matt Langel of Colgate. The two coaches were friendly rivals during their playing days, Earl at Princeton and Langel at Penn, and childhood friends going back to the eighth grade.
Brian Earl
Cornell opens season at 0-2
Cornell began the Brian Earl Era this past weekend with two road contests against Binghamton and Siena. By late Sunday afternoon, the Red found itself with an 0-2 record to start the season.
Cornell Season Preview – The Big Red reset
What happened last year: (10-18, 3-11 Ivy) Cornell was projected to finish last in the league and did just that despite a 2-2 start to league play that included back-to-back wins over Harvard and Dartmouth fueled by freshman phenom Matt Morgan. With a nine-game Ivy skid doing the Big Red’s season in, coach Bill Courtney was dismissed after going 60-113 in six years in Ithaca.
What’s new: The coach, for one. Princeton playing legend and all-star assistant Brian Earl jumped at the opportunity to lead a program, taking over the reins from Courtney and poised to make the Big Red less frenetic at both ends of the floor over time. The team’s lone freshman, Josh Warren, reportedly brings with him a comfort level in the post that the Big Red often lacked last season, and he also brings with him a natural rivalry with Penn freshman Ryan Betley. (Warren and Betley both attended Downington West in Downington, Pa.) But as a Courtney recruit, Warren apparently prefers an up-tempo style, which leads us to …
Q&A with Princeton coach Mitch Henderson
Editor’s Note: Our Toothless Tiger, George Clark, caught up with Princeton coach Mitch Henderson one-on-one at Jadwin Gym in late September for a comprehensive interview revealing what to expect from Princeton this season as the Tigers look to live up to their No. 1 Ivy preseason ranking. (Please excuse the technical difficulty separating Parts 1 and 2 – it’s presented intact because it demonstrates how gracious Henderson is and was in real time throughout the interview.)
Part 1
- how Henderson feels about the Ivy postseason tournament and Penn’s potential for participating as host
Part 2
- Henderson’s trust in former assistant and current Cornell head coach Brian Earl during games
- what Kerry Kittles’ role is as a new assistant for Princeton
- which Pete Carril quote from the 1991 Princeton media guide pertains to the 2016-17 Tigers
- why Hans Brase is “the edge”
- how Spencer Weisz has followed in T.J. Bray’s footsteps
- what to look for from Princeton’s freshman class
- what’s behind Princeton’s brutal nonconference schedule
Preseason pole position belongs to Princeton
Mitch Henderson enters his sixth season as the head coach of his alma mater with a great deal at stake. Regarded as one of the best young coaches in the country, he has enjoyed tremendous success, always finishing in the Ancient Eight’s first division. His teams have feasted on the league’s lesser lights, while faltering, sometimes catastrophically, against Harvard and Yale. And that’s the rub.
Harvard and Yale have won or shared the Ivy title during Henderson’s tenure at Jadwin, accounting for two-thirds of the Tigers’ 21 Ivy losses in the last five seasons (against 49 wins). The Tigers hope they can replicate the recent experiences of James Jones’ Yale quintets. Denied an outright title two years ago by an otherworldly loss in the final seconds of the season finale at Dartmouth, the Bulldogs then lost a tense playoff against Harvard. The 2015-16 Yale club rebounded brilliantly to win the Ivy crown with a stellar 13-1 record, suffering its lone conference defeat at the hands of the Tigers at Jadwin, 75-63.
Cornell turns the corner in Red and White
On Saturday night, as the Lynah Faithful filled the hockey arena for a preseason contest against Brock University, a slightly more modest crowd populated Newman Arena to watch the Cornell men’s basketball team take part in the annual Red-White Scrimmage. While the team did have three contests in Spain this August, Saturday night’s event marked the unofficial beginning of the team’s 2016-17 campaign and the crowd’s first glimpse of its new coach, Brian Earl.
The Red team consisted of Darryl Smith, Donovan Wright, Matt Morgan, Will Bathurst, Josh Warren, Kyle Brown, and Joe Bayless, while the “White” squad had David Onuorah, Robert Hatter, Desmond Fleming, Stone Gettings, JoJo Fallas, and Jack Gordon. On the sidelines for the scrimmage were Troy Whiteside, Jordan Abdur-Ra’oof, Braxston Bunce, Joel Davis and Pat Smith. After two 12-minute halves, the “Red” team defeated the White by a score of 57-46.
Big Red, long road
On Sept. 9, Cornell became the seventh Ancient Eight school to release its schedule for the upcoming 2016-17 campaign. After getting the travel bug from its August trip to Spain, the Big Red will hit the road for 18 of their 29 games in Coach Brian Earl’s first season.
The 15 game nonconference schedule will see Cornell heading away from Ithaca for trips near and far 11 times in the season’s first two months. The Big Red will have some relatively short trips for games against Binghamton, Siena, Lafayette, Monmouth, Syracuse and Albany. They will earn its frequent flier miles with trips to Houston, Laramie, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Cornell goes 3-0 in Spain summer tour
Now that first-year students (Thanks, Princeton!) have arrived on North Campus and the upper class students have found their way over to West Campus and various other parts of Ithaca, it is time to have a short update on the Men of Earl.
After his hiring last April, Brian Earl kept Assistant Coach Jon Jacques, who will start his fourth year at his alma mater. Donovan Williams came over from Princeton and Adam Gierlach arrived from Rice to join the program as assistants.
Brian Earl: The right coach at the right time for Cornell
In 2010, Cornell Athletic Director Andy Noel took two weeks to hire Virginia Tech assistant coach Bill Courtney as the replacement for the enormously successful Steve Donahue. Following the Big Red’s run to the Sweet Sixteen and Donahue’s jump to Boston College, Noel selected the former Bucknell All-Patriot League player from a final group that included Wisconsin assistant coach Gary Close and then-Temple assistant and
present Colgate head coach Matt Langel.
Ivy 60 for 60: Brian Earl
Following our countdown of the top 10 moments in each Ivy school’s men’s basketball history this summer, Ivy Hoops Online is delighted to continue celebrating the 60th anniversary of modern Ivy League basketball by honoring the top 60 players in Ivy hoops history (in no particular order). For the next entry in our Ivy 60 for 60 series, we cover one of the greatest players in Princeton basketball history and the Big Red’s new head honcho:
Brian Earl, one of the Princeton Tigers’ best and best-loved players, is the new head coach at Cornell. It is his first head coaching job.
A gifted player, Earl was a member of three Ivy championship teams, including Pete Carril’s final season as head coach in 1995-96. Over the next two seasons, the Tigers went 51-6 overall and 28-0 in the Ivy League. Earl’s 1,428 career points rank seventh in Tiger history. He graduated as the league’s career leader in three-point field goals. A product of Medford Lakes, N.J., Earl started 113 games for the Tigers, a school record. He was named Ivy League Player of the Year in his senior year.