If you were a little baby trying to catch a nap in Dad's arms up in Section 207, this was your kind of week.
The Quakers played five home games in nine days, going 5-0 and drawing a combined crowd of 26,982. And you still wouldn't have been awakened until Ibrahim Jaaber threw himself an inbounds pass off Andrew Naeve's back Saturday night.
It was that kind of week at the Palestra, the rare occurrence when 6,000 could sound like 600, unless they were saying "Hey, you suck."
Why? One word. Defense.
When Mark Zoller said at practice Wednesday that defense wins championships, he wasn't reading a slogan from the back of a T-shirt, he was speaking the truth.
In six of their nine Ivy games, the Quakers held their opponents under their season averages - with one of the exceptions being Brown, a 60-points-per-game team that scored 61 in its Feb. 2 loss.
Princeton, which sets the bar low at only 51 points per game, still missed by 16. Columbia (the first time) and Harvard each fell by more than 20 points short.
But no game more exemplified the Quakers' focus like the Columbia game Friday night.
The Lions' leading scorer, John Baumann, finished with the same number of points as Governor Rendell did from his seat in Section 114. And big Ben Nwachukwu had just five as the Lions shot just 19 for 50.
And it wasn't just that the shots weren't falling. They combined for just nine shots, or three fewer than Joe Bova.
"We've got to give Penn credit for shutting our interior offense down," Lions coach Joe Jones said.
Not that it needed much proving, but Zoller and Stephen Danley, with a little help, proved once again why they're the best frontcourt in the Ivies.
"We doubled them in the second half, and it bothered them" during the New York meeting, Quakers coach Glen Miller said. "And tonight I thought it bothered them too."
In addition to the double teams when they got the ball, Zoller and Danley did a superb job fronting the post men to prevent the entry pass, which limited their touches.
Even Saturday night, when Penn did allow a high point total, they won the game by forcing 20 turnovers from a fast-paced Cornell offense.
"I think we played good pressure defense," said Zoller. "We got in the passing lanes and caused a little bit of havoc."
The focus on defense, which the Quakers have been stressing since the Ivy season opened more than a month ago, has gone hand-in-hand with another change.
Using Ken Pomeroy's formula over the non-league schedule, Penn averaged 71.7 possessions per game. Now, it's lowered that number to 62.1 for the nine Ivy games.
And all jinxing aside, if the Quakers are to make the Tournament and win a game, it's not going to be the way they played against North Carolina, with 76 possessions for each side, but the way they came within eight of Texas last year, with 55 possessions per side.
So even though this team has shown that it wants to run, the "uglification" of their game seems to be coming at the right time.
Even if it's putting the crowds to sleep.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
