A game worth remembering

I was going to write about how special it was to have streamers at tonight's Penn-Saint Joseph's game, but what happened at the beginning of the game pales in comparison to what happened at the end.

If you've ever wondered how much of an impact a single whistle by the officials can have on a season, you're about to find out, because the traveling call on Mark Zoller could very easily have that kind of an impact. That turnover resulted in the layup by Abdulai Jalloh which proved to be the winning basket, and 25 seconds of play later Penn was stuck with by far its most disgraceful loss of the season.

I think there are two cardinal rules in basketball: make your shots and don't let the referees decide the game for you. Both teams violated the first rule tonight by shooting below 40 percent from the field, but only Penn violated the second.

It shouldn't have come down to that travel, whether you think it was a good call or not, and it sure as heck shouldn't have come down to an officials' timeout to debate whether Steve Danley's second free throw with just under nine seconds remaining hit the rim.

But because all of those things happened, Penn lost the last game on its schedule against a team that has anything close to respect from the NCAA selection committee. The athletic directors who will gather in the selection room on the final day of Spring Break don't care about Brian Cusworth or Casey Hughes, unless they beat Penn and make things even worse. As it is, whatever shot the Quakers had at getting a reasonable seed for a mid-major is almost surely gone now. Yes, I'm assuming Penn will win the Ivy League, but despite Yale's win over Harvard yesterday I still think that Penn is a class above the rest of the conference. St. Joe's would destroy the rest of the Ancient Eight without trying nearly as hard as it did tonight.

In other words, Penn will almost surely face a physically superior team in the NCAA Tournament that can use its size advantage to overcome any chance of an upset. Which will mean 12 years and counting since the Palestra faithful have celebrated anything other than an Ivy League title in March.