Picking up where it left off in mid-March, tournament champion Penn was selected first in the Ivy League men’s basketball preseason poll that was released on Oct. 13.
Penn received 11 first-place votes from the 21-person media panel and a total of 157 points.
Harvard, which finished the regular season in second place, earned the second slot on the 2026-27 list on the strength of seven first-place votes and 146 overall points.
Despite losing its entire starting lineup, two-time regular season champion Yale was selected for third with two first-place votes and 133 points.
Princeton, which returns 16 of 17 players from last year’s fifth-place edition, secured the final space in the upper division with 99 points and a single first-place vote.
Five straight appearances in Ivy Madness wasn’t good enough for the panel to keep Cornell in the top half, and the Big Red ended up in fifth place with 82 points.
The sixth, seventh and eighth spots went to Columbia (69 points), Brown (42) and Dartmouth (30), respectively.
Following the release of the poll, the Ivy League and the Field of 68 partnered for the conference’s annual Media Day. For the second straight season, Jeff Goodman and Rob Dauster moderated the conversation with all the teams and the league’s executive director.