Penn really wasted an opportunity for a quality win when it could not put away Texas-El Paso in its season opener. Those are victories that really impress the NCAA Tournament committee come Selection Sunday and help a team get a better seed.
And over the course of the season, how many of these chances does Penn really have?
The answer is realistically two, or at the absolute most, four. Those games are against Villanova, Seton Hall and maybe Temple and Saint Joseph's, depending on how well they play this year. The rest of the Quakers' games are really just games that hurt them if they lose.
In short, Penn is stuck in schedule purgatory. This is an affliction that befalls many low- and mid-major teams throughout the country. No good teams will schedule the Quakers (especially at the Palestra) because in turn, they are afraid to lose to Penn. So Penn has to turn to bad teams to fill its schedule, with only sparing shots at a big win, which the Quakers seemingly have not taken advantage of in the last few years (Colorado, Wisconsin and Providence, to name a few).
Penn finished last year at No. 94 in Jeff Sagarin's computer rankings among 334 in Division I. For simplicity's sake, I am defining a quality win as any win against a team in the top 50 in the rankings, teams that all were in the NCAA Tournament or on its immediate bubble.
Last season, Penn played two teams in the top 50, but they were also both in the top five, in Duke (No. 1) and Villanova (No. 5). While the Quakers played respectably in both contests and almost shocked the Wildcats, they could not reasonably expect to win either game. Other than that, Penn's best game was against
No. 56 St. Joe's and its best game that was separately scheduled was against No. 64 Colorado. Penn's best win last year was against No. 110 Hawaii.
Meanwhile, the Quakers have lost games in the last three years to teams ranked 199, 93, 73, 91, 110, 142, 154, 157 and 131, which does not include Ivy League losses to even worse-rated teams.
This year, Penn has three opponents in the top 50 from last season (it's too early to use this season's rankings) - Syracuse (34), Villanova (5) and North Carolina (13). The next best
opponents are St. Joe's (56) and Seton Hall (66). Three losses to the powerhouses won't hurt Penn, and neither will a loss at the Pirates unless they turn out to be worse than they are. But then Penn has to play the rest of its season perfectly, or it risks another 15-seed if it wins the Ivy League.
Going back to the 2001-02 season, Penn has played 18 games against teams ranked higher than it in Sagarin's final ratings - going 3-15. The wins, if you're interested, came in 2001-02 against No. 50 Temple, No. 43 Manhattan in 2003-04 and No. 46 St. Joe's in 2004-05.
Penn has played exactly six games over that time against teams ranked between Nos. 25 and 50, games that are legitimately winnable against quality opponents. But about one chance a year is not fair for the Quakers to show what kind of team they are.
Penn is not alone in this quandary. A quick look at some other mid-majors in last year's NCAA Tournament showed that the Quakers' schedule is very comparable to theirs. The real difference is that those schedules are shared across all the teams in the conference, which is not the case in the Ivy League, where most teams do not play schedules nearly as competitive as Penn's.
Better collective scheduling raises a conference's rankings as a whole, and also means a greater possibility of upsets. More quality wins by Ivy teams means better ratings for all of them.
In the meantime, Penn is left with no choice but to play nearly perfect in order to avoid its fate from last season. Scholarships may not be an option in the near future in the Ivy League, but encouraging more competitive scheduling by its teams could lead to better collective production.
Josh Hirsch is a senior urban studies major from Roslyn, N.Y., and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jjhirsch@sas.upenn.edu.
