Random Brown/Yale trivia

Quakers fans would probably like to forget the Yale/Brown road trip to open the Ivy League season two years ago. Penn was swept in New England and never really got back in the Ivy race.

Don't expect a similar result this weekend -- it's never happened.

Here are a few tidbits starting with 1957, when the Ivy League adopted the current traveling partner system.

Penn has swept the Brown/Yale homestand 36 times, split 12 and has never been swept at the Palestra. The Quakers have swept the homestand in 12 of the last 14 seasons.

Penn is 41-7 against Yale at home (4 losses on Fridays, 3 Saturdays) and 44-4 against Brown (3 Friday, 1 Saturday).

When the Bears won in Philadelphia two years ago, it snapped a streak of 12 straight losses. That's nothing compared to Brown's winless streak from 1959 to 1985. The last three losses have come by a combined 11 points. At their current pace, Glenn Miller's team should win at the Palestra somewhere around 2016.

Yale's last win over Penn at the Palestra was Feb. 15, 1997 by two, 60-58. James Jones' team has historically averaged a win about every eight seasons. All things being equal, the Elis are on pace to win in Philly this season. Yale's last outright Ivy League title came in 1962. Penn has won all 23 of its titles since then. The Elis actually won a game at the Palestra in 2002 -- the Ivy League playoff against Princeton -- and then lost to Penn, sending the Quakers to the NCAA Tournament.



First official RPI released

The NCAA released official Ratings Percentage Index numbers for the first time ever yesterday. This ends years of speculation and reliance on Web sites that claim to know the secret formula.

Here's where the Ivy League ranks:

Penn: 120
Harvard: 137
Yale: 177
Cornell: 249
Columbia: 259
Brown: 287
Princeton: 291
Dartmouth: 318

Penn is officially:

0-5 against RPI 1-50
1-0 against RPI 51-100
2-0 against RPI 101-150
1-1 against RPI 151-200
2-0 against RPI 201-250
3-0 against RPI 250+

What does this mean?

Well, the team will have only one quality win at the end of the season -- at Hawaii. It's a shame, because Penn had pretty good leads against three of its top 50 opponents -- St. Joe's, Temple and Colorado.

Wins over those three teams would have put Penn in great shape should they make the NCAA Tournament. Had Penn beat all three of those teams, they may have been in contention for as high as a 9 seed. Had the Quakers beaten just one or two of those teams, they probably would have boosted their eventual seed by one. Instead, the team is going to have to fight for a 13 seed now.



You have nine points!

Seven years ago this week, Penn fans chanted that at Princeton as the Quakers took a 33-9 lead at the half. I'm sure something else happened in that game, but it's not worth discussing ever again.

Tonight, Temple fans got their own chance at "you have nine points" as UMass headed to the locker room down 34-9 at the Liacouras Center. Leading scorers? Rashaun Freeman and Stephane Lasme each had 4. The Owls' Antwayne Robinson had 11. If you're scoring at home, 34 is the same number of points Temple scored two weeks ago at UMass - in the entire game.

Fortunately for the Big 5 host, the Quakers' fate of 1999 did not repeat itself. Temple won 76-47. This is a huge win for John Chaney's team, coming on the heels of its upset of then-No. 21 Maryland on Saturday. Usually the Owls knock off a good team, then get embarrassed (like earlier this year when they beat No. 18 Alabama then lost to unranked Auburn by 31).

If Temple (38th in the RPI) can play like this more than just once and a while, Philly should have three teams (Villanova, Penn and Temple) in the Tournament and as many as five (add La Salle or St. Joseph's and Drexel in the NIT) in the postseason. If nothing else, the strong RPIs from the rest of the Big 5 will help buoy Penn down the stretch of bad Ivy opponents.

Other Penn opponents in the 14-team Atlantic 10 tonight: SJU lost at Dayton 77-69 and La Salle won at Duquesne 75-66.



Penn's best win

With the loss to St. Joseph's on Saturday night, Penn pretty much guarenteed that its highest quality win this season will be its victory over Hawaii. How does this best win compare to the best wins in other seasons where the Quakers have gone to the NCAA Tournament? Here's how:

2005-06: Hawaii (currently 79th in the RPI)
2004-05: St. Joe's (51st RPI)
2002-03: Villanova (65th)
2001-02: Temple (47th)
1999-2000: California (78th)
1998-99: Temple (16th)

And how did these wins translate into NCAA Tournament seeding?

2004-05: 13 seed
2002-03: 11 seed
2001-02: 11 seed
1999-2000: 13 seed
1998-99: 11 seed

Actually, the more I look at things, the more this team seems to resemble the 1999-2000 team. Our best wins will end up about at around the same place in the RPI. Both teams went 1-3 in the Big 5, with the losses coming by close margins. The 1999-2000 team went 14-0 in the Ivy League, with all but two wins coming by double-digit margins. Looks like Penn is on track for a similar Ivy season. A perfect conference slate would most likely yield a 13 seed.



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.



Big 5 Page Six

There isn't much opportunity for a sportswriter to write a gossip column, short of following Penn athletes into Smoke's. But last night when everybody who was anybody in the 50-year history of the Big 5 convened in the Palestra, I knew it was my chance. So here's the report as they pulled out the red carpet (actually it was a beige tarp) over the floor of college basketball's most historic gym.

Who was there: Among the hundreds in attendance last night were "the Owl without a vowel" Bill Mlkvy, along with the Explorer who could spare a few, Dr. John Giannini. And the legendary Penn big man Ernie Beck, who predated the Big 5, and 2004 graduate Mik Austin were enough to show that the Quakers came in all ages, sizes and genders. But even with all the big names that I would see later, I knew that this was a special event when the first two people I saw were the Explorer mascot and a Temple cheerleader in full uniform. She wasn't the biggest crowd favorite, though. That distinction belonged to John Chaney, who always had a line of people waiting to greet him, and Fran Dunphy, as congratulations were certainly in order for his 300th win.

Best dressed: It was a wide open contest since Jay Wright was in South Bend, Ind., preparing for tonight's game at Notre Dame. Chaney's look was certainly an improvement from when his tie is hanging on for dear life on the sideline. But the award goes to former Explorers star Doug Overton, who got the crowd laughing with a speech while wearing a sport jacket, which was a color that can only be described as "La Salle gold."

Worst dressed: Goes to Palestra custodian Dan Harrell, who wore his traditional outfit of tee-shirt, shorts and golden kicks and put on a tie for good measure.

Age-reduction surgery?: Legendary Temple guard Hal Lear graduated in 1956? The way he lit up the room last night, he seemed more like Class of '86.

Lines of the night delivered by former St. Joseph's player and coach Jack McKinney:
On longtime Temple SID Al Shrier: "Started at Temple in 1946 and forgot how to get home."
On the surprise he faced the first years of the Big 5: "We had to play Penn. From the Ivy League. Shoot, I thought they only had football."
On one of his toughest defensive assignments: "First game against Temple, I held Lear to 25 points. I don't know what he had in the second half"



"The plan is to do it."

That was the statement on the question of streamers from the Big 5 this evening at the truly extraordinary Big 5 50th Anniversary banquet. More to come on the night's festvities later from myself and Zachary Levine, but in the short term, the big news is that there will more than likely be streamers for throwing after each team's first basket at the Penn-St. Joe's game.

Having said that, I was also told by a source at Penn Athletics that it has not been confirmed and approved by all the people who need to confirm and approve it. So we'll see what happens when the time comes, but for the Big 5 history buffs out there, it makes tomorrow night even more memorable.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed yet, The Buzz now has its own RSS feed. Right-click on the orange "XML" icon and copy the link into whatever program you use to keep track of your preferred news sites and blogs.



Anything but Uniform: St. Joe's

For the first time this year, Penn will be playing a team that has two away uniforms. The Hawks have their standard black, and the alternate red.

The Hawks did wear the red in their last game against Saint Louis, which St. Joe's won. So we'll see if they are alternating or going with what worked last.

I personally like the black jerseys better. They're more colorful (I like black better than gray -- it seems stronger) and the red jerseys look too much like those of fellow A-10 teams UMass and Fordham.

Temple also has a similar color scheme but wears black uniforms, so maybe the red is a good Philadelphia alternative to the Owls.

It turns out that St. Joe's wore these red uniforms last year. I like them better than this year's because of the black trim, and I would even favor them over the black uniforms. Too bad they're gone.

So I hope it's black tomorrow night.



Here we go again

Yet another big weekend for Philadelphia basketball starts in just a few hours with the Big 5 50th Anniversary banquet at the Palestra. It promises to be quite the occasion -- I've heard that nearly 800 former coaches and players have been invited.

In addition to the three games Saturday (apparently there are only around 1,000 tickets left for the Temple-Maryland game), the Palestra will be open again on Sunday for a high school hoops quadrupleheader. The feature game is Oak Hill Academy, the No. 1-ranked team in the nation, versus local powerhouse Episcopal Academy. The company in charge of the operation is the Scholastic Play by Play Network, which brought LeBron James to town a couple years ago. There are still some tickets available for Sunday's event, mainly behind the baskets.

For Penn fans, of course, the focus will rightly be on Saturday night's big game against St. Joe's. While I would rather not normally give advice to fans, I would just like to offer a little bit to the Quakers faithful. One of the first things you learn covering the Hawks is that their student section shows up very, very early, especially to games at the Palestra. It's bad enough that a significant portion of the Penn student section often doesn't arrive at their seats until after tipoff -- a fact which Fran Dunphy even mentioned during The Line last fall -- but it's even worse when it's a Big 5 game and the other side's fans are taunting the lack of people at Penn's end of the floor.

This year would be a great time to reverse that trend, and if you get in early enough you'll probably also bump into some of the many Big 5 legends that will be honored throughout the game and at halftime.

Enjoy the weekend.



Long road to 300

Enjoy seeing Fran Dunphy's 300th the other night? Waiting to see another 300-game winner in the Ivy League? You'll be waiting a while.

Given their current paces (winning percentages) and assuming an average of 28 games per season, the other seven Ivy coaches will have to be at it for at least another decade before they reach 300, and for some, it's much longer than that.

Here's the list:

Frank Sullivan, Harvard (163-220): 300th win in 2016-17

Glen Miller, Brown (88-92): 2020-21

James Jones, Yale (84-100): 2022-23

Joe Scott, Princeton (69-87 at Air Force and Princeton): 2024-25

Joe Jones, Columbia (30-40): 2027-28

Steve Donahue, Cornell (51-101) 2031-32

Terry Dunn, Dartmouth (12-30) 2041-42

Some notes:
Scott is on pace to get his 300th with Princeton in 2028-29.

By the time Donahue reaches 300, he is on pace to be 0-64 against Penn.

When Terry Dunn reaches 300 in 2041-42, he'll do it at the age of 88.



This time, the shot was bad

Last week, I defended Greg Kuchinski for taking a last-second shot against Lafayette.

This week, I have no defense for Brian Grandieri's layup with six seconds to play against La Salle. It was not a half-court shot, and there was no one guarding him. Grandieri could and should have just dribbled the clock out. It wasn't even at the buzzer

The only thing the layup did was give the Explorers another unnecessary possession. Who knows what could have happened in those last six seconds? Any Knicks fan like me could tell you what can happen in that time frame.



Most undervalued

I said this last year, and I still think I'm right. Penn's most undervalued player is clearly Mark Zoller. He has yet to get enough credit for his offense, and tonight's win over La Salle was not an anomaly when it comes to Zoller's production.

He had 25 against the Explorers on 10-of-17 shooting. Four of six from three-point range. This was one of the few times Penn's offense was able to effectively work in Zoller's jump shot -- something that ought to happen more often, especially when Jaaber and Osmundson may be doubled.

Let's not forget Zoller came into tonight shooting 53 percent. He and Osmundson have now taken roughly the same number of shots (141 vs. 134), but Zoller has hit 76 compared to Osmundson's 52. And Zoller has logged 342 minutes compared to Osmundson's 460.

Don't write off Zoller's numbers because he's a big man, either. Plenty of his points come off jumpers, and I think that needs to be a bigger part of Penn's overall game. If you don't believe me that it will be effective, just ask La Salle coach John Gianinni.

Lastly, an obligatory congratulations to Fran Dunphy on 300 wins -- a topic that will certainly come up again on this board. Now it's just 214 more to catch the legendary (I can't believe I'm saying that about a Princeton man) Pete Carril for first all time in the Ivy League.



Senseless La Salle trivia

Fifty years ago tomorrow, La Salle beat Penn, 84-73, at the Palestra in the schools' first official Big 5 meeting. Here's what has happened since:

Penn is 22-17 against the Explorers at the Palestra, 0-1 at the Civic Center and 2-1 at Tom Gola Arena. The Quakers won all three meetings played at the Spectrum (92, 94 and 96).
The two teams did not meet in 93, 95, 97 and 99.
Penn is 12-9 against La Salle in the month of January including the last six first-month meetings since 1985. Other months: 9-8 in December and 6-2 in February.
Nineteen contests have been decided by four or fewer points (Penn is 10-9) and three have gone to overtime (2-1, the latest of which being a 81-76 Penn win in 2001).
The Quakers have won the last four meetings, the longest streak in series history.
Penn is 74-114 all time in Big 5 games. La Salle is 77-111 and has lost its last 15 dating back to a 71-67 win over Temple in 2002.



Anything but Uniform: La Salle

And 1 must love tonight's matchup -- both Penn and La Salle wear And 1 uniforms, which are nearly identical styles except for one major difference.

Penn's uniforms have two-color piping. This same style extends to the colored uniforms as well. The Explorers, on the other hand, only have one color of piping.

Same is true of La Salle's away blue uniforms, which just have white piping.

Personally, I'm a fan of the two-color look. If you have two school colors, you might as well use them. And, La Salle used to have a yellow jersey, which with the current And 1 style might look pretty good.

I'm not sure which color La Salle will be wearing tonight, though. Last year, Penn was in the home whites, which might mean that the Quakers will be in blue (or red) tonight.

If La Salle is designated as the home team, then my money is on Penn to wear blue, though. In the last two years, Penn has worn blue all three times at home that it was not in white, and is 3-0 (against Columbia this year, Saint Joseph's last year and Drexel the year before).

But, Penn now has worn white at home against the Dragons two years running, so we'll see what happens at 7:30.



The Big Ten's Ivy League takeover

It seems like the Big Ten is slowly taking over the Ivy League.

First, Columbia appoints Lee Bollinger -- former University of Michigan president -- as its president. Now Cornell has named University of Iowa president David Skorton as its new president.

This should mean good things for Ivy League athletics, which are largely controlled by the presidents of the conference's eight university presidents.

Bollinger (1-1 in Supreme Court decisions) openly supports increasing the prestige of athletics at Columbia and throughout the league.

Skorton seems to come from the same mold. At Iowa, he changed longstanding policy so that the athletic director could report directly to his office. He also oversaw the merger of Iowa's men's and women's athletics programs.

And to start his tenure at Cornell, Skorton wisely took to the ice of Lynah Rink -- clad in an authentic Cornell hockey jersey, as was his wife -- to meet the players, students and university community.

Hopefully this means good things for Ivy League athletics policy in the next few years. I'd love to see Bollinger and Skorton (two former Big Ten rivals) unite to overturn the most unfair and illogical rule in all of college athletics -- the Ivy League's ban on football postseason play.



An Ivy League Super Bowl (Part 2)

I posted last week about the possibility of having an Ivy League graduate in the Super Bowl for the first time since 2001. Well, it's happened.

The Steelers' Sean Morey (a Brown graduate) will face off against the Seahawks' Isaiah Kacyvenski (a Harvard grad).

This is the first Ivy vs. Ivy Super Bowl matchup since 1984. It is also certain that an Ivy League alumnus will win an NFL title for the first time since Princeton grad Jason Garrett won a Super Bowl with the Cowboys in 1994.

My money's on Morey and the Steelers.

In other Ivy League NFL news:

- The Buffalo Bills' Marv Levy (who holds a master's degree from Harvard) hired Dick Jauron (a former Yale standout) as head coach today

- Here's the official list of I-AA players invited to the NFL combine. Cornell's Kevin Boothe (expected to go as early as the third round) is the only Ivy invite:

QB Tarvaris Jackson, Alabama State; DE Chris Gocong, Cal Poly; OT Kevin Boothe, Cornell; QB Erik Meyer, Eastern Washington; QB Ingle Martin, Furman; QB Bruce Eugene, Grambling State; DE Jason Hatcher, Grambling State; WR Marques Colston, Hofstra; FS Antoine Bethea, Howard; PK Jon Scifres, Missouri State; WR Miles Austin, Monmouth; QB Travis Lulay, Montana State; FS Reed Doughty, Northern Colorado; CB David Pittman, Northwestern State; QB Barrick Nealy, Texas State; TE Daniel Fells, UC Davis; DE Darrell Adams, Villanova; OT Paul McQuistan, Weber State



Surprise, surprise

Normally we use this forum to discuss things that surprise us from the world of Penn, Ivy League and Big 5 sports.

But I've decided it's time to discuss something remarkably unsurprising. Over the weekend, one of the many teams I have covered during my time at the DP -- the women's squash team -- recorded a pair of 9-0 wins over No. 10 Bates and No. 12 Bowdoin in New Haven, Conn. And the previous weekend, it was two 9-0 wins for the fifth-ranked Quakers over No. 8 Williams and No. 11 Amherst.

That's two weekends, 1,008 miles of travel for four wins that not only could I have guaranteed you a Quakers victory, but also the score.

When the No. 5 team and the No. 11 team meet in college hoops, it's the prime time matchup that everyone's talking about on Monday.

In squash, not the case. The only question was how many points the Quakers would give up all morning. (Amherst recorded 18 points to Penn's 243.)

So if anybody tells you that he's going to a matchup of the nation's No. 5 team and No. 11 team, hope for his sake that it's basketball and not squash.



Thanks a lot Princeton

I used to think that the most annoying thing about Princeton was the school's disgustingly ugly orange band uniforms. However, I have reconsidered. Now the school's most annoying feature is its final exam schedule.

In purely academic terms first, it makes no sense that students finished classes on Dec. 16 but did not begin finals untill Jan. 18. Imagine having a final on Saturday (yes, they have Saturday finals) Jan. 28. That would be a full 43 days after your last day of class.

Even Harvard, which also has this illogical final exam schedule, doesn't have a break that long.

But from a basketball stance, Princeton's exam schedule is even worse because it's a hinderance to the other Ivy League schools -- especially Penn. Since Penn is Princeton's travel partner, the Quakers cannot play an Ivy League basketball game during Princeton's obnoxiously long break. This explains the 20 day break in Penn's League schedule.

This hurts Penn in many ways. First, it destroys any sort of momentum the team had after it's pair of blowouts in the Ivy League opening weekend against Columbia and Cornell. Also, it makes it almost impossible for the team to schedule games during this break. Every other team in the nation is in the middle of conference play. Penn's lucky that Lafayette, La Salle and St. Joe's were wiling to play this late in the season.

The rest of the League should pressure Princeton to move its exam period up a few days. There's no reason why the school waits until Jan. 9 to begin reading days and then waits until Jan. 18 to begin finals. Nine days of studying after three weeks of vacation?

If Princeton could start finals on, say, the 14th (the same day Harvard begins) then there could be Ivy League play for the entire league this coming weekend. That would just mean a few days less of an already too long vacation/reading days period.

P.S. Tannenwald, if you have to explain a joke, it's probably not that funny (see below).



Saturday in the Ivy League

Yesterday in the Ancient Eight, Columbia beat Cornell, Brown beat Yale, and Georgetown beat Duke.

Is it just me, or is the last one of those three the best result?

(If you don't get the joke, Georgetown's head coach, John Thompson III, was the head coach of Princeton from 1999 to 2004. He was succeded by Joe Scott, and we all know what happened after that.)



Former Penn player Pettinella heading to UVA

I bumped into former Penn basketball player Ryan Pettinella last night.

For a quick recap, after he left Penn after the Spring 2005 semester and transferred to Cincinnati. Then, when coach Bob Huggins was dismissed over the summer, Pettinella changed his mind and left UC.

Now, he tells me that he will be going to the University of Virginia to play basketball next year after attending school this year at Monroe Community College, near his home in upstate New York.

A full story on Pettinella will appear later this week in The Daily Pennsylvanian.



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