Embarrassing. Simply embarrassing. All season long, Quakers fans have been patiently waiting for senior Jamie Lyren to step up and take control of the Penn men's basketball team as a captain is supposed to do. But to everyone's dissatisfaction, Lyren's year has been an exercise in futility. Saturday night, the senior from Wadsworth, Ohio, committed an error that most freshmen would not make. With under two seconds left, he fouled Yale point guard Gabe Hunterton who calmly sank two free throws, allowing the Bulldogs to escape from the Palestra with a 60-58 win. This play, along with several other glaring follies, including a critical missed lay-up in the final seconds of the Drexel game, forcing the second-most turnovers on Penn (43) and his overall struggle to run the Quakers' offense with any confidence has at times made it painful to watch Lyren on the court. Too often Lyren has looked afraid to drive and create his own shot or penetrate the defense and then dish off to an open teammate. Instead he has spent a majority of his court time wandering behind the three-point line, where instead of shooting the ball from downtown, Lyren consistently passes it off to another Quaker. Meanwhile the one-time starter is nailing a healthy 40 percent of his treys. It would be completely unfair to blame Lyren's timid on-court nature entirely on poor technique. There is the role of Penn coach Fran Dunphy, who has had just as much to do with Lyren's demise as anyone else. Instead of giving him the freedom to drive and/or shoot, he made it clear from the outset of the 1996-97 season "Jamie should always be thinking pass first." And for the record, Lyren has carried out Dunphy's order to a T. Out of the eight-man rotation Dunphy employed this winter, he has put up the fewest shots (66). What is even more frustrating is all the talk of what a great defender he was going to be. Only five games remain on Penn's schedule and Lyren has fewer steals (20) than freshman Michael Jordan and junior Garett Kreitz. He also has grabbed the least number of rebounds of any of his backcourt mates (at 49 nearly 20 behind Jordan). To add insult to injury, it was Lyren's defense which cost the Quakers Saturday night's contest. By far the most important thing any coach stresses in last second situations is never foul. It is a phrase that Lyren has most likely heard several hundred times during his career, and yet he allowed Hunterton to get past him and then committed a double-whammy when he pushed the junior Eli from behind. Looking around the league, the strong play of several other seasoned Ivy guards has not helped Lyren's situation. Dartmouth's Kenny Mitchell, Harvard's Tim Hill, Cornell's Alex Compton and Princeton's Sydney Johnson all have impressive conference statistics to boast about. Mitchell and Hill are ranked one and two in the league in assists, Johnson has the highest free-throw percentage and Compton places third in three-point percentage. Meanwhile Lyren only breaks the top 10 in assists, at No. 7. In retrospect, if Hunterton had missed both foul shots and the game goes into overtime and Penn wins then maybe the blunder by Lyren might get overlooked. This did not happen, and instead of Lyren heading into the locker room with his head high, the captain scampered off the court wearing a label -- Mr. Unclutch -- he has donned on more than once this season. The senior could easily have avoided all of the negativity, if he had played with half the confidence and intensity of the 1995-96 captains, Ira Bowman and Tim Krug. Over the past four years, Quakers fans have been spoiled to have captains who were leaders, hit clutch shots and garnered respect from opponents around the league. In not one of these categories has Lyren succeeded comparably. On a team with only three other upperclassmen, Lyren needed to be a leader, on the floor and off, for the Quakers to be successful. His knowledge of the Penn system alone should have given him an advantage. After all, Lyren learned from two of the best guards the Penn has ever had take the court in Jerome Allen and Matt Maloney. As Penn's season winds to a close, Lyren can only look back at 1996-97 and say "what if." Since the Columbia-Cornell road trip, Dunphy has made a decision to start rookie Michael Jordan over the veteran. With Lyren's minutes free-falling from about 25 to only seven against Princeton, time is ticking for the point guard to correct his latest faux pas and prove to himself, Dunphy and the fans he can compete at the collegiate basketball level and he deserves the right to be a Quaker for a fifth season.
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