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A wild Saturday capped the regular season for the Ancient Eight. When the dust settled, Yale and Princeton tied for the league title, while Penn settled for third place and Cornell captured the final spot for this weekend’s Ivy League Tournament at Jadwin Gymnasium.
In what was arguably the conference game of the year, it was the worst of times in the opening half and the best of times in the second stanza for the hometown Tigers.
Yale won its fifth Ivy League championship in the last eight seasons Saturday with an 84-75 win at Brown before a sold-out, rowdy crowd of 2,003 at the Pizzitola Sports Center.
“It’s a wonderful feeling,” 24-year Yale coach James Jones said. “To be able to win on the road in a hostile environment shows the character of the guys in our locker room.”
Brown, meanwhile, missed out on an opportunity to punch the program’s first ever Ivy League Tournament ticket with the loss, allowing Cornell to sneak into the tourney.
Yale won’t be making an Ivy League Tournament appearance in coach Dalila Eshe’s first season at the helm after finishing fifth in the conference, but the Bulldogs came through on Senior Day with a 63-53 victory over Brown before many program alumni Saturday at John J. Lee Amphitheater.
The only senior captain for Yale (13-14, 7-7 Ivy), Camilla Emsbo, was honored before the game. Emsbo was injured all season and will compete at Duke next year as a graduate student.
The conference’s next-to-last weekend began on Friday night with a nationally televised game between Princeton and Harvard, two of the four teams headed to the Ivy Tournament. The last time they met in January, the Crimson came away with a 67-59 victory, ending the Tigers’ 42-game Ivy League win streak.
Playing in front of more than 1,700 fans at Jadwin Gymnasium, Harvard took a 14-12 lead after the first quarter. The visitors used a late 13-2 run to open up a 12-point lead before Princeton cut it to 10, 30-20, at the half.
In a critical game in the fight for an Ivy Madness berth, the Cornell men’s offense never made the trip up to New Haven.
The Big Red scored fewer than 60 points for the second consecutive game, losing 76-58 to Yale for their fifth loss in the last six games
The loss takes Cornell out of the driver’s seat for the final spot in Ivy Madness.
The Ivy League Tournament bubble.
Certainly not uncharted territory for the Cornell men. But after the way the season started to trend for the Big Red, it’s a bit of a surprise we’re talking about this.
Cornell has lost four of its last five games, dropping the team from a tie for first to a tie for fourth. By virtue of a tiebreaker, the Big Red would be in Ivy Madness over Brown since it beat Yale and Penn. The Bears have only beaten Princeton among the trio of teams tied for the conference lead.
But that tiebreaker is by no means safe.
What happened?
Penn picked a good time to turn in its best performance of the season.
The Quakers (16-11, 8-4 Ivy) pummeled Brown on Saturday at the Palestra, 90-69, and vaulted themselves into a three-way tie for first place in the Ivy League standings.
Though neither Penn nor the league have provided official confirmation, analytics expert Luke Benz said postgame that the Red and Blue have now clinched a trip to the Ivy League tournament.
Usually, this writer uses the top of these articles to describe some pivotal moment where Penn seals either victory or defeat. The pivotal moment on Saturday was the opening tipoff. The Quakers shot out to a quick 9-0 lead and never looked back. It took a string of circus shots by the Bears (13-12, 6-6) in garbage time to trim Penn’s final margin of victory below 30 points.
Just how good were the Quakers on Saturday? BartTorvik.com, a KenPom competitor, assigns every team in Division I a game score of 0-100 for each game it plays. Think of the number as the probability a team will win through its performance on a given night.
Penn finished with a final game score of 97.
It’s all happy Quakeaways today after the Red and Blue pulled off their biggest Ivy weekend sweep in some time:
Ivy back-to-backs can bring out the worst and best in teams, often in the same weekend.
Coming off an 80-37 drubbing against Princeton at the Pizzitola Sports Center in which it got outscored 33-2 in the third quarter, Brown rebounded 22 hours later with a 68-59 win over Penn.
Following Saturday afternoon’s action, the upper division pulled away from the bottom half, while the Brown rebuild took a positive step forward.
Columbia bounced back from a disappointing result against Princeton by taking it out on Yale in front of 1,485 fans at Levien Gymnasium. The Lions jumped out to a 32-17 halftime lead on the strength of a 14-0 second quarter run. The Light Blue made it a 20-point game after three and widen it to a game-high 28 points with just under four minutes to go in the contest. Defensively, they limited the Bulldogs to 32% shooting and only 49 points, the first time they held an Ivy opponent under 50 this season.
Week seven for the Ancient Eight saw Yale avenge its shocking opening day loss at Columbia and move into a tie at the top of the conference leaderboard. After a close half that saw the Bulldogs holding onto a slim 31-26 lead, the Bulldogs outscored the last-place Lions 58-32 for the dominant 31-point win. Yale, winners of six straight, had 13 different players in the scoring column and shot 65% from the field.