After early struggles, Miller sold his system

History put Glen Miller in an unfortunate spot.

Win, and he did what he was supposed to do. Lose and he was the second coming of Joe Scott.

Get your seniors to roll with the changes, and it was just another Ivy title. Suffer a mutiny, and it was a disappointment of historic proportions.

Fortunately for Miller, he did the former. There were no defections and no uprising from a senior class that had won two Ivy League titles under Fran Dunphy.

Eventually, Miller and his assistants got the team to buy into their system and win the program's 25th Ivy championship.

All it took was a compromise.

And a 38-point loss.

"There was a tug-of-war for about half a season," senior Ibrahim Jaaber said. "One of the things that happened that got everybody focused was that we went and embarrassed ourselves at North Carolina. After that point, everybody knew that somebody had to sacrifice for the team, and I think everybody stepped up and worked a little bit harder, and the coaches pushed us a little bit harder. And that's when we began to jell."

Funny what suffering a program's worst loss in seven years on national television will do.

Pieces of Miller's philosophy began showing on the court and were, in turn, reflected in the box score. There was marked improvement in Miller's most-cited statistic - field-goal percentage defense.

In the Quakers' 18 games since the UNC debacle, they held opponents under 40 percent in eight of them, while that happened in just three of their first 12 games.

In the Ivy League, it was even better, as the Quakers held the seven also-rans to 40.1 percent, well below their composite season percentage of 44.7.

Defense helped Penn rack up a 13-1 Ivy League record. That seems like a given in hindsight, but it wasn't always so. Until the Quakers got smoked in North Carolina, there was always some hesitation in the ranks of the senior class.

So Miller, not one to disrupt the work in progress that Dunphy set in motion, decided to compromise. At first, he incorporated much of what had won Dunphy 10 Ivy titles. Those were the training wheels. From there, it was a gradual process of accepting change, and for that acceptance, Miller knows exactly who to point the finger at.

"I'm really thankful to Mark [Zoller], Ibby and Steve [Danley] that they accepted this staff and somewhat of a new philosophy," Miller said of his three starting seniors. "They embraced it, they gave it everything they had and they were good leaders. They made the transition easy."

If Jan. 3 in Chapel Hill was when the old philosophy fell apart, it was three weeks later to the day that the new one came together.

"The win against Temple . was a turning point for our staff," Miller said. "You need to have success against some good teams for guys to really buy into everything you're doing."

Now with his 15 players behind him, Miller is no longer in the unfortunate position. In fact, it's just the opposite.

Lose to Texas A&M; Thursday, and given recent history, he'll have done what he was supposed to do.

Pull off the upset, and he'll be remembered for a long, long time.

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.

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