PHILADELPHIA—Every game in the Ivy League seems like another night of quiet desperation.
This is the only one bid conference in the country where the regular season has extra meaning because only four of the eight teams will qualify for the conference tournament, which will be played this March at Harvard.
Penn, a perennial contender, started the Ivy season with two straight losses to rival Princeton for a second straight season. The Quakers needed 20 points, 8 rebounds, 7 assists and 3 blocked shots from first team all-league senior forward AJ Brodeur to defeat Harvard, 75-72, in overtime Friday night at the Palestra to scramble off the ledge.
“We approached this game with a sense of desperation,’’ Brodeur said. “We started last season with an 0-6 record and needed to win a lot of big games at the end of the regular season just to qualify to conference tournament. We didn’t want to go there again.’’
Harvard (13-5, 2-1) may be without its two best players—senior forward Seth Towns, the 2018 Ivy League of the Year’ and starting point guard Bryce Akins, the team’s leading scorer, who missed the game with a strained foot. But the Crimson are the deepest team in the league and rallied to push Penn to the brink after falling behind 24-5 in the first half, forcing overtime when Noah Kirkwood made a layup with 1.7 seconds remaining in regulation.
Brodeur came up huge in overtime with two field goals and three assists and Penn shot 6 for 7 in overtime to take a six- point lead with 13 seconds left. Harvard’s Justin Bassey knocked down a three and was fouled. He missed the free throw, but Kirkwood grabbed the rebound but missed a three with six seconds left that would have tied the game again.
“This are no nights off here anymore,’’ Penn coach Steve Donahue said.
This winner of this increasingly fluid league has become good enough to merit at least a 12th seed in the tournament.
Yale, a 15-4 Top 60 team with a 3-0 Ivy record, has non-league wins over Alabama and Clemson and a 70-67 loss at Carolina. Harvard has beaten Texas A & M and Cal. Penn has beaten Alabama, Providence and Temple and has competitive losses to Villanova and Arizona. Princeton (8-8, 4-0) has a win over Cal. Brown had beaten Rhode Island.
Penn and Princeton controlled this league for close to 50 years. After Hall of Fame inductee Pete Carril retired from Princeton and Fran Dunphy left Penn for Temple, a Steve Donahue-coached Cornell team advanced to the Sweet 16 in 2010 with wins over Temple and Wisconsin.
“We filled a vacuum,’’ Donahue said. “And the rest of the league re-invested.”
Harvard hired former Duke star and Michigan coach Tommy Amaker, who led the Crimson to four straight Ivy League titles from 2011 to 2015 and first round wins over third seed New Mexico in 2013 and fifth seed Cincinnati in 2014. James Jones coached to its first Ivy title in 54 years in 2016 and the Bulldogs defeated Baylor in a first- round game.
Three different teams– Princeton, Penn and Yale- have won the Ivy tournament since it started in 2017.
The league regular season itself has always been hard to win because of the six Friday-Saturday back to back weekends and the fact that, unlike other leagues, there are no graduate transfers and it is hard to keep redshirts for a fifth year after they graduate because bigger brand name schools can offer the best players full athletic scholarships. Towns, for example is a potential pro who has heard from 70 schools since he put his name in the transfer portal.
The Ivies are planning to change regular season scheduling next year to create a different dynamic. The conference’s signature back to back weekends will be featured three times during an expanded 10 weeks of conference play. The teams will also play Saturday-Monday games on MLK weekend and then six single game weekends, concluding with each team playing a single game weekend game against its travel partner.
But this league is so unpredictable any more that every Friday-Saturday the rest of the regular season should be filled with drama.
