Hot off their Ivy Madness win, the Penn men’s basketball team lost to the No. 3 seed, the University of Illinois, 105-70, in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. During the late stages of the game, as Penn trailed Illinois, members of the Penn Band directed a now-viral cheer towards the Fighting Illini, which garnered millions of views and significant backlash. The social media pile-on was swift. Headlines called the behavior “despicable” as commenters called the cheer “classist,” “arrogant,” and the distilled essence of “Ivy League entitlement.”
As expected, the social media uproar has largely died down. The University of Illinois has moved on. The Penn Band’s Executive Board has issued a formal apology. However, what matters is not the opinion of opposing fans or outside commentators, but what this moment says to the nearly 900 varsity athletes who chose Penn — and to the recruits who might.
The Penn Band’s response was the move of a sore loser. Not entirely because the chant itself was offensive, but because it opted out of competitive spirit entirely. In our loss, rather than acknowledging a hard-fought season, cheering on our team in one of its most high-profile games this season, or respecting a better opponent, the response was to redirect our focus to future earnings and employment — as if our classmates competing on that court didn’t matter.
Even if it was intended to be a joke directed at our opponents, the cheer was ultimately an insult to our very own athletes.
Consider what Penn men’s basketball managed to accomplish. Under first-year head coach Fran McCaffery, the team won back-to-back overtime upsets against Harvard University and Yale University, securing the Quakers’ first March Madness berth since 2018. On top of that, these are student-athletes who chose to attend Penn, where they balance the academic rigor of one of the world’s greatest research universities with the demands of NCAA Division I athletics. Our athletes deserve a fanbase that stands by them, not one that completely abandons the competitive spirit of the game the moment things get difficult and simultaneously overshadows their very success.
I would be foolish to stop with men’s basketball. This year, Penn gymnastics won its fifth consecutive GEC Championship title. Last year, the Penn men’s squash team recorded a perfect regular season and won the College Squash Association’s Potter Cup. And across all 33 programs, the Quakers consistently achieve athletic success — not despite being hardworking students, but because of it. The scholar-athlete model is core to Penn’s identity.
This brings me to the question that should concern us far more than any viral moment: what does a chant like that say to the potential Penn recruits?
For elite student-athletes, choosing a school is as much about athletic culture as it is about academics. A recruit wants to know their fanbase will show up in both victory and defeat. Athletes don’t want to represent a student body that drowns out their accomplishments in controversy and retreats behind a diploma when the game gets hard.
When Penn’s viral moment is a chant that treats athletics as if they’re irrelevant, we fail to project the pride we all hold in our teams. We tell recruits: When you lose, we won’t stand with you; instead, we’ll hide behind a veil of simply not caring, as if we’re somehow suddenly “above” sports entirely.
That mentality does not represent Penn.
Now that the controversy has largely blown over and the appropriate apology has been issued, it’s right to move on. But this incident serves as an important reminder about sportsmanship, about how Penn and the Ivy League as a whole is perceived from the outside, and most importantly, about how we as fans appear to our fellow Quakers, and those we hope to welcome to our community in the future.
PETER KENNEDY is a first year from West Chester, Pa. studying History and Philosophy, Politics & Economics. His email is kenned29@sas.upenn.edu.
