New England is no stranger to undefeated seasons. After watching their Patriots go a perfect 16-0 in the regular season before losing in Super Bowl XLII to the New York Giants, those fans in the Northeast can only hope that the Dartmouth women's basketball team doesn't follow in the Pats' footsteps.
The Big Green are coming off of two more Ivy wins this weekend - making them 9-0 in the League - as they demolished Penn by 19 points Friday and eked out a win against Princeton, 43-42, Saturday.
Perhaps for Dartmouth (14-9 overall) the game against the Tigers was what the Patriots' final regular season game against the Giants (a slim 38-35 win) was: foreshadowing of the destruction to come. Or maybe it was just a passed test, proving that the Big Green truly are the league's best.
The last time the Ivy women's basketball champion finished undefeated in the Ancient Eight was 2003, when Harvard won the crown.
The Big Green have five more conference games left, so don't start chilling the champagne just yet - especially since the last of those games is a contest against the second-place Crimson (15-8, 7-2 Ivy) in Hanover, N.H.
Perfectly set-up to be a season-ending spoiler? Guess we'll have to wait and see.
On the Markley. If Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith had known how effective sophomore forward Emma Markley could be in destroying opponent Ivy defenses, she may have played Markley more than 9.5 minutes per game in her freshman campaign.
The Yorktown Heights, N.Y., native is fourth in the League in scoring with 14.1 points per game and is third in rebounds, averaging 7.6 boards per contest.
No one knows this better than Princeton and Penn, Markley's latest victims. Friday against the Tigers, Harvard was down by 22 at halftime, but then Markley took over. She scored 12 of her 16 points in the second half, leading the Crimson to a four-point victory.
Against Penn, the 6-foot-3 sophomore finished with 23 points and 14 rebounds - her seventh double-double of the season - in a 69-54 Harvard win.
Quakers guard Sarah Bucar said after the game that Markley may have "[come] out with a vengeance" after underperforming in the teams' Jan. 30 meeting. That night she scored just six points and grabbed five rebounds in the Crimson's 72-63 win (which was their 500th victory in school history).
Lucky for the Crimson, it looks like Markley's coach gets it this time around.
"[Markley] is wonderful," Delaney-Smith told The Harvard Crimson.
That was easy. There was no gray area this weekend in Ivy women's hoops.
Dartmouth, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell all came away with sweeps and the other four - Princeton, Penn, Yale and Brown - well, didn't.
While on the men's side, upsets are becoming commonplace, this weekend's women results are perfectly in line with the expected outcomes. The four winners are, not coincidentally, the top four in the league.
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