A year removed from a one-loss run to the Ivy crown, the Harvard women's basketball team came within seconds of suffering its second conference defeat in its first three games.
The worst part? Penn - losers of 10 straight at the time - was the team that nearly knocked the Crimson (10-8, 3-1 Ivy) past last year's loss total, leading virtually wire-to-wire before junior Emily Tay's game-winning hoop with 14 seconds to play. Tay scored 36 points in two games this weekend en route to winning the Ivy League Player of the Week.
But it was that shot against Penn that may have changed the Crimson's season. They now have three wins in four games - a record significantly better than 2-2 - to open the Ancient Eight slate. This is good enough for a four-way tie with Cornell, Yale and Dartmouth to top the conference standings.
Showdown for the cellar. The Quakers may own the Ivy League's longest active losing streak at 12 games, but they have some company on the bottom of the conference totem pole.
Brown (1-17, 0-4 Ivy) has just one win its first eighteen games of the season, good for an .056 winning percentage. Before their lone victory - a 65-61 home triumph over Howard on Dec. 1 - the Bears had lost their first seven games of the season by an average of nearly 25 points.
Since the win, the Bears have dropped their next 10, highlighted by a jarring 98-22 loss to then-No. 19 George Washington.
The start of the Ivy season produced more of the same. Brown has limped to an 0-4 conference record, losing by at least 23 points in two of its first three games. In their most recent effort, the Bears actually led by 10 at the half to Columbia. But they managed to seize defeat from the jaws of victory with a lackluster second half that ultimately gave way to an agonizing outcome in overtime: 56-52, Lions.
All in all, it has not been pretty. Brown is the worst Ivy team in free throw percentage, field goal percentage, three-point percentage, scoring offense, scoring margin - and, of course, wins.
Woman of Steel. Princeton senior Meagan Cowher, daughter of former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher, extended her double-digit scoring streak to 22 games after tallying 17 and 11 points, respectively, in the Tigers' two Ivy losses at Dartmouth and Harvard over the weekend.
After averaging 17.7 points and 7.3 rebounds per game as a junior, Cowher has continued to dominate in her final collegiate season, leading the Ivy League in scoring (17.4) and rebounding at a career-high clip of 7.9 per game, good for second in the Ancient Eight.
Thus far, the Tigers (4-15, 1-2 Ivy) seem to be squandering their star's farewell campaign. The team has lost two of three games to open the Ivies, with its only win coming at home against the Quakers on Jan. 12.
Princeton sits in sixth in the current conference standings, with only winless Penn and Brown trailing.
