PROVIDENCE, R.I.– Ivy League champion Yale is on spring break this week so the university invited the pep band from Hillhouse High close to his New Haven, Conn. campus to play at their NCAA first round game against Baylor here Thursday afternoon.

The band made a point of playing the famed Bulldog fight song (“Bulldog, Bulldog Bow Wow Wow. Eli Yale”) at halftime, much to the joy of the group of fans who did show up to watch 12th-seeded Yale’s Bulldogs’ historic 79-75 victory over the fifth-seeded, more talented Big 12 Bears at the Dunk. By the end of the game, Yale’s inspired performance turned the sellout crowd into Bulldog fans.

This was the first time ever Yale, an elite academic university, won an NCAA tournament game. It was their first NCAA appearance since 1962.

“This is huge,” senior forward Justin Sears, the Ivy Player of the Year, said. “Yale is an amazing place. You can speak to anyone there and they’re doing something special, and the history is there, the prestige is there. Just to be among the first guys to win a tournament game is huge. Everyone is going to look back and say this is the team where it started. I don’t think it’s really hit us how big this is yet.”

Yale’s win had a Cinderella feel to it.

And had a Cinderella story to match.

Before the game, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Harvard graduate, spoke to the team. “She was the first Democrat to win in 12 to 16 years and the first woman to win,” Sears said. “She told us she was an underdog and nobody expected her to win. But she did and she siad we were in a similar position.”

In reality, the Bulldogs were the better team on this day, leading for the final 18 minutes of the game.
And Yale sophomore Guard Makai Mason, a a 6-1 first team All Ivy selection from The Hotchkiss School in Greenfield, Mass. who committed to Yale at the end of his sophomore year in prep school, was the best player on the court.

Mason scored 31 points, making all 10 of his free throws for a 23-6 team advanced to a second round match up against powerful Duke here Saturday. Mason was fairly highly recruited as a ninth grader but dropped out of travel ball to work on his game in the school gym with his father, who was an assistant coach on the Hocthkiss staff. Yale coach James Jones became sold on Mason when he watched him play a pick up game against his father in 10th grade. “His father was playing in these yellow sneakers. I’ll always remember that. Makai was so intent on winning that game. You could see it in his eyes. I could see then I had somebody special;”

Junior forward Brandon Sherrod, another first team All Ivy selection, added 18 as the Bulldogs outworked and out rebounded the bigger, more powerful Bears– the No. 1 rebounding team in the country– 36-32.
The Yale Daily News reported former Yale captain Jack Montague, who had been expelled from school Feb.

10 after a five person disciplinary committee, who ruled he was guilty of having unconsensual sex with a female co-ed in 2014, was somewhere in the building, watching his ex-team play the type of beautiful, flawless basketball that immortalizes a mid-major team from a one big conference.He was seated two seats down from team faculty liason Stephen Pitt, master of Ezra Stiles College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential colleges.

“We’re not on national TV every night, so guys haven’t heard of Makai Mason before he dropped 31,” Sears said. “He should be a scholarship at any high major program. But it is a chip on our shoulder for us, when we stepped out there. You could see Baylor didn’t take us very seriously from the start of the game but when we started hitting shots they realized we’ were for real. It’s the same with a lot of mid-major teams. That don’t really do a good job scouting them or think highly of them.We have a bunch of seniors on the team and guys who play hard. Anything can happen.”

Maybe now the NCAA Selection committee will give the Ivy League a longer look when they select and seed teams.

Cornell was a 12th-seed when the Big Red defeated Temple and Wisconsin to to the Sweet Sixteen in 2011.
Harvard was a 14th-seed when the Crimson defeated New Mexico in 2014 and a 12th- seed when it defeated Cincinnati in 2013.

“History will tell you that the Ivy League has done pretty well as of late in the NCAA Tournament,” Yale coach James Jones said. “I looked at the RPI and I was curious why Princeton wasn’t anybody’s bubble team. They had an RPI in the 30’s and they’re one of three teams in the 30s that didn’t make the tournament.

“But no one ever mentioned them, and probably because they’re an Ivy League team. They didn’t have a great non-conference in terms of a signature win/ But what people don’t understand how this works. We never get a high major team to visit our buildings.

“So it’s hard to get those wins to prove you belong because, when you have to go on the road and play Baylor, it’s a whole different sotry than playing them on a neutral site or playing them in your building. So the matrix of it, say we should have been somewhere between a 10 and a 13 seed and we got a 12.

But we have a 40. Our Ken Pom is 39. If those numbers don’t mean anything, why do you have them?
“Last year, we were in a situation where we should have been in the NIT, and there were like 13 teams that had a lower RPI then us and every single team got in. They just skipped us. We beat Connecticut on their court and they got in. That’s like impossible to do.”

Yale left little question it belonged against Baylor. The Bulldogs shot 53.1 percent and made 22 of 29 free throws. They also survived some late drama after Taurean Prince cut a six point lead to 76-75 with a three point jump shot in the final 14 seconds. But guard Nick Victor made a free throw and Sherrod added two more with two seconds remaining to lock up the game.

It didn’t take long for the celebration to break out. This is what this tournament is all about during the first week.