Sebastian Stockman: Yale eliminated - for now

EASTON, Pa. -- The 3,600 Ivy League basketball fans packing Lafayette's Kirby Sports Center Saturday night witnessed not a basketball game so much as a coronation. The Penn men's basketball team grabbed an NCAA tournament berth by beating Yale, 77-58. Leading from start to finish, the Quakers wouldn't even let the Elis come up for air. Quakers fans loved it. The noise level seldom dropped below a dull roar as the Penn faithful outdid the sizable Yale contingent in pretty much every facet of fandom. With a battery of signs and rollouts -- "1962," "40 more years," and "Yale: see you again in 2042." -- Penn fans harped on the fact that Yale hasn't been to an NCAA Tournament since before we put a man on the moon. The generally witty signs were alluding to the Yale program's long history of ineptitude and suggesting that Yale's 20-win season -- its first since 1948-49 -- was a fluke, and that the Quakers wouldn't be seeing the Elis in an important game again anytime soon. But if the Elis have anything to say about it -- and, rest assured, they do -- they'll have you know that this isn't your grandpa's Yale ball club. "None of us were born 40 years ago," said backup Yale center Josh Hill, who led the Elis with 14 points on Saturday night. "We're not really concerning ourselves with the people that came before us. Nothing against them, but [Yale's history] has nothing to do with us. We're trying to start our own tradition, and I think we're on the right path." It would certainly seem that way. Since 1999, when he took over a team that had gone 4-22 the previous season, Yale coach James Jones has gotten more and more out of his team every year. This season, they got him a share of the Ivy League championship. This from a program that last finished with a winning conference mark 11 years ago. The Elis owe a great deal of their success to their intense, fiery coach. Rather than just patching together a team for one title run, Jones seems to have performed the Herculean feat of turning around the Yale basketball program. The team has no seniors (several people left when Jones took the helm), so this is wholly Jones' team. They've only improved under his tutelage. "The good thing about my squad," Jones said Saturday night. "Is that we have everybody coming back, all the guys will have another opportunity." What's more, the Elis' two best players are their freshmen guards, Alex Gamboa and Edwin Draughan. The short, quick Gamboa was this season's Ivy League Rookie of the Year while the tall, skinny Draughan led Yale in scoring. After just one season, these two are probably Yale's best-ever backcourt tandem. Just as important as Jones' success in convincing talented recruits to go play in New Haven, Conn., though, has been his ability to convince them that there's no reason they shouldn't be in the Ivy's elite. Throughout the Elis' title hunt, Jones has put up an us-versus-them front, bristling at the merest hint of a slight or the suggestion that Yale was somewhere it wasn't supposed to be. "We didn't need this season to get confident," Gamboa said. "No one believed in us over the season, and we all believed in ourselves. We went out there and we proved that we deserve to win championships in the Ivy League." Note the freshman's use of the plural. In features about Jones -- of which many were written this year --ÿthere's an often told story. In Jones' first day on the job at Yale, he walked into the Elis locker room and found utter disarray. He was appalled and let his players know it, by making them run ungodly distances at ungodly hours. The locker room has been clean ever since. At Yale, Jones has manufactured a winning atmosphere where there wasn't the hint or memory of one. Jones found a program with zero tradition, so he started his own. "Obviously, Penn is where we want to be," Hill said. "But we did win a three-way tie for the championship in the Ivy League. That's something none of us will ever forget, something nobody can ever take away from us." As the Penn team cut down the nets Saturday night, the Elis stood off to the side, with their coach, watching. Abruptly, Jones gathered his team around him, yelled forcefully into the huddle and then ushered the Elis out of the gym. "I told them that we had more season to play," Jones said. "That for us -- 20 wins in our league this year -- we should get an NIT bid. I told them to keep their heads up." This has to be the difference between Jones and those who preceded him at Yale. He not only wants a spot in the NIT, he expects it. While it's true -- as one of the Penn signs read -- that "You can't spell Eliminated without ELI," it won't be a valid taunt forever.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.