The body of work

I had the pleasure recently of interviewing Andrew Baratta, a former Penn basketball player who has just published a novel called What Color Justice. There will be a review of the book next week in the DP when the print edition comes back from its Spring Break hiatus, though I will say here that I greately enjoyed reading it. If you are thinking about going to the NCAA Tournament to watch Penn, you should buy the book to read on the plane -- and do so now, because you may have to get it off Amazon.com since it's very hard to find in stores.

Before the review gets published, though, I thought I would share Baratta's thoughts on this year's Penn team, because I think they are quite interesting. Baratta was a member of the 1994 Quakers team that beat Nebraska in the NCAA Tournament, so he knows plenty about how to succeed at this time of year.

"This team seems to have overachieved," he said. "I don't know if it's because the rest of the league is down or if they're that much better at playing as a team, but I've been real impressed at the way this team has used its component parts most effectively."

I would agree: this team as a whole really is better than the sum of its parts. Indeed, the strengths and weaknesses of every player currently in Penn's rotation with the possible exception of Ibrahim Jaaber are pretty well known. Yet even though the scoring hasn't been there the way it has been in years past, Penn's ballhandling and defense have carried it to another Ivy League title and another 20-win season, even if beating BYU-Hawai'i doesn't count to the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee.

Now is that overachieving? It might just be. Because of Tommy McMahon's injury and the lack of minutes given to the other reserves, this year's team ended up being almost exactly the same as last year's but without Tim Begley and Jan Fikiel. In other words, Penn tried to do what it did last year -- when it also finished the season 20-8, though without the Division II win and with a 13-1 conference mark instead of 12-2. This year, though, the Quakers basically did it with seven players instead of nine.

Add to that a stronger non-conference schedule than last year's, and things become even more difficult. With the possible exception of Fordham, all of Penn's non-conference losses came against better teams, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the Quakers struggled against the far more physical Rams. That doesn't necessarily excuse the result, nor does it excuse the manner in which Penn lost to Temple and Saint Joseph's. Still, that's worth keeping in mind, as is the fact that Penn beat two RPI Top 100 teams. That's more than Iona, Murray State, South Alabama, Winthrop, Montana and Davidson can say, and all those conference tournament champions have better RPIs than the Quakers.

As for Ivy League play, RPI guru Ken Pomeroy predicted that Penn would go 12-2 in the Ancient Eight, and look what happened. And those two losses are only there because of ten seconds out of the 85 combined minutes of basketball in those games.

So maybe this year's Penn team did what it was supposed to do. And maybe, as the talking heads like to say, Penn's "body of work" is like the whole of its team -- better than the sum of the parts of this season. If that's true, then Penn should get a 14 seed on Selection Sunday.

And if that happens, maybe Quakers fans will have at least some reason to daydream about a first NCAA Tournament win since Baratta wore Red and Blue.