Weekend of Upsets in College Sports: ECAC Hockey, NCAA Hoop Surprises

In case you were studying too hard or too drunk to notice, a few interesting things happened this weekend in college sports. A few of them even had some relation to Harvard sports, specifically the Crimson hockey team.

The wild race for the eight playoff berths in ECAC hockey became more confused this weekend, if that is possible, when a hot Boston University hockey team lost to an awful St. Lawrence squad, 8-6, Saturday night. That's the same team that Harvard bombed, 10-0, three weeks ago, and the same one that Boston College murdered on Friday night (10-4).

Highly touted Cornell also got the bump from lowly Pennsylvania down in Philadelphia, and Rennsaeler Polytechnic Institute, the hardest team to figure out this year, pulled one of its bi-weekly shockers by nipping top-ranked New Hampshire, 4-3, in overtime.

Clarkson managed to keep things calm by beating Princeton, 3-0, but Dartmouth was not quite as fortunate. One of the many teams involved in the heated battle for the playoffs, the Big Green managed to be tied by one of the few teams not involved. Tim Taylor's "proud" Yale team turned the trick, 5-5, in a regionally televised ECAC contest.

'Overmatched'

Incidentally, the Yale-Dartmouth game made it into your living room only because St. Lawrence coach Leon Abbott did not want his "overmatched" Larries to be seen on TV against powerhouse BU. The natural result of that move was a big upset of one of the nation's top ten teams.

In basketball, the college scene was replete with upsets, the biggest of which was Northwestern's 99-87 romp over number two Michigan. Number three Alabama fell to Kentucky (number six), 87-85, and fourth-ranked North Carolina suffered annihilation at the hands of "Tree" Rollins and Clemson, 93-73.

Top-ranked San Francisco came within one basket of becoming another member of the exclusive "Sports Illustrated Jinx" club, just edging Santa Clara, 71-70, on a Chubby Cox basket with two seconds left.

The Dons, the cover story in this week's magazine, raised their record to 21-0 with the victory, though they had to rally from 16 points behind to do it.

Santa Clara had a chance to lock it up in the last minute, but a Kurt Rambis foulshot on the front end of a one-and-one situation with nine seconds left bounced off the rim and out of bounds, giving San Francisco the one last chance it needed.