M. Hoops Odds and Ends

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Here's a hodgepodge of information on the basketball team that I have been meaning to post for a while:

A couple weeks ago I posted about how Penn would be in amazing shape for the NCAA Tournament if it had hung on to beat Temple, St. Joe's and Colorado. The Quakers led in all three of these games at home before eventually losing.

I e-mailed the heads of two of my favorite college basketball Web sites -- Jerry Palm of collegerpi.com and Warren Nolan of warrennolan.com -- to find out where Penn would be ranked had it won all three games.

Palm said Penn would be ranked 34th in the RPI, while Nolan said that the Quakers would be 38th. This would rank them ahead of the likes of Kansas and Maryland.

You'd think that Ibrahim Jaaber's scoring numbers would have gone way up once he got to play against Ivy League defenses. But that's actually not the case.

In fact, his scoring has dropped off a bit -- from 17.6 points per game in non-Ivy play to 16.8 points per game in Ancient Eight games.

I asked Fran Dunphy about this earlier this week and he says he's actually not surprised about this. He told me that Ivy teams have been watching Jaaber and planning a way to shut him down all year.

But Jaaber has become a much more efficient offensive player in Penn's four Ivy games. His field goal percentage is up from 51.4 to 60.5. His three-point shooting is also way up, from 33.8 to 55.6 percent. And he has almost doubled his assists per game, from 1.8 to 3.5.

With West Virginia's loss last night to Pittsburgh, Penn is one of just six teams left in the nation that are undefeated in conference play.

The other five are Duke, Memphis, Gonzaga, George Washington and Bucknell.