Preseason (sort of) picks

OK, so I'm a week late with the picks. With five games on tap for this weekend, now seemed timely enough for my Ivy League predictions with the huge advantage of knowing that Dartmouth beat Harvard in the opener.

1. Penn (12-2): Miller and Co. will straighten it out and Jaaber will be dominant another time around. Look for a three-peat, but beating last year's 12 wins won't be as easy as I thought it would be in November. Still, it will be the 19th straight "P" champion.

2. Columbia (10-4): A couple of very suspect non-conference losses, but this seniorless team will contend. Anything worse than 9-5 would be a disappointment.

3. Princeton (9-5): The Tigers' nine wins will be borderline unwatchable, but that's not what matters in this league. We'll set the over/under in the Princeton-Brown game at 61.5. I'll take the under.

4. Cornell (8-6): No Adam Gore, no title shot this year, but there's still plenty of young talent there, including freshmen Louis Dale and Ryan Wittman. Next year is setting up pretty nicely.

5. Yale (6-8): Check some of my posts from earlier this year, and you'll see that I was much higher on Yale before they took the court. I expected much more than 12.9 combined points per game out of the Holmes brothers and better than 6.6 and three boards out of Sam Kaplan. James Jones has some serious work to do quickly.

6. Dartmouth (5-9): Definitely the league's strangest story so far. Started 0-6, then went 6-1. Could Leon Pattman make that much of a difference? It certainly looks like it.

T-7. Brown (3-11): Keenan Jeppesen's departure is huge, and there's still plenty of growing pains with a brand new system.

T-7. Harvard (3-11): Brian Cusworth has just three more games worth of eligibility, and without him, the Crimson is nothing but guards, which won't get it done in any league.

Fellow blogger Josh Hirsch is in Vegas right now, where he could find action that looks a little like this (Courtesy of Caesar's via vegas.com): Princeton (-2.5) at Columbia, Penn (-5.5) at Cornell and Dartmouth (+6.5) at Harvard.

So given his absense and my mild colorblindness, here's this week's Anything But Uniform to the best of my knowledge.
Cornell: Red
Columbia: Blue

Finally, here are the updated player rankings for the Ivy League based on the formula from Berri, Schmidt and Brook's The Wages of Wins. The formula accounts for points, field goal and free throw attempts, rebounds, steals, assists, blocks, turnovers and fouls. And all the numbers are adjusted to Penn's total of 13 games.

1. Zoller, Penn 131.0
2. Cusworth, Harvard 118.3
3. Jaaber, Penn 116.5
4. Grandieri, Penn 86.5
5. Baumann, Columbia 83.1
6. Naeve, Cornell 82.6
7. McAndrew, Brown 76.3
8. Nwachukwu, Columbia 71.5
9. Dale, Cornell 68.7
10. Danley, Penn 66.5

Other Penn players (out of 116 in the league who have seen minutes):
55. Kach 13.5
56. Egee 12.5
T-71. Votel 5.0
84. Franklin 1.5
T-85. Gill 1.0
T-88. Reilly 0.5
T-96. Lewis -0.5
T-103. Schreiber -1.0
108. McMahon -2.5
111. Cohen -5.0
115. Smith -15.5

Enjoy the games this weekend.