Lonely at the top

Tonight and tomorrow night Yale and Brown will get their first shot at beating Penn, the back-to-back defending champs and only undefeated team left in the Ivy League. The Quakers must have a similar approach to each league game, but on the other side of the bench, everyone else is gunning for the top dawgs.

Penn again is the team to beat, and Ivy squads often feel like they have an uphill battle to fight, trying to stop a team which comes into the league with so much talent and so much confidence.

"Since they've been winning they just have a certain mystique about them," Yale senior swingman Casey Hughes said. "I think that they have that winning tradition to an extent manifests itself because they're used to winning and the expect to win. While some other teams haven't experienced winning against them a whole lot, it's [mentally] tough to change that tradition, so hopefully we change that a little bit on Saturday."

Yale and Brown have the skills to pull off a win on their home courts against the Red and Blue, but if they can't stop the freight train that is Penn, its momentum might be too much to handle late in the season to challenge for the crown.