HARVARD BASKETBALL 2005-06: One Last Chance To Reverse History

There are no banners hanging from the rafters, no trophies in the case, and no dream championship runs to look back upon.

In the 50 years of Ancient Eight play, Harvard has never won a league title. While three of the other Ivy schools (Brown, Cornell and Columbia) have only claimed the title once, the Crimson’s ineptitude in its championship quest overshadows them all, in much the same way that the droughts of the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox dominated talk surrounding the 2004 and 2005 Major League Baseball playoffs. In fact, certain members of this year’s Harvard squad have adopted slogans similar to those repeated by fans of the aforementioned baseball clubs.

“We believe that this is our year,” junior center Brian Cusworth says.

The chatter seems to get louder every few years, when Harvard has enough momentum to make it a favorite to finish in the upper division—a distinction it has earned this season by placing second in the preseason Ivy League media poll.

Any discussion of an Ivy title drought must begin with the dominance of Penn and Princeton. The Quakers and Tigers have combined to claim a share of all but six Ivy titles and have grabbed a piece of all but two championships since 1962 (Brown 1985-86 and Cornell 1987-88).

“Penn and Princeton have always been very strong, and they’ve taken care of each other as travel partners,” Sullivan explains.

In the 2001-02 season, Yale snuck into a three-way tie for the Ivy title with Penn and Princeton, looking to break the Quakers and Tigers’ combined streak of 13-straight NCAA appearances. Since Penn had the best record against the other two, it looked on as the Bulldogs downed Princeton in the first round of the playoff for the tourney berth. But the Quakers then beat Yale 77-58 in Easton, Pa. to quell the best charge that the six non-P’s have mustered since the Big Red tourney appearance.

Over the past 10 years, Harvard has the third-best Ivy record behind Penn and Princeton. The reason that the Crimson has been able to maintain that positioning on the heels of the Killer P’s is its remarkable consistency—Harvard has finished 7-7 six times in the past 10 years.

In that span, the Crimson has won 10 league games just once (10-4 in 1996-97), but that still left Harvard four back of a Tigers squad that recorded the first of two straight perfect Ivy marks.

In its history the Crimson has only cracked the 10-win barrier within the league twice, with the other instance being an 11-3 second-place finish in 1970-71 which left Harvard three games back of 14-0 Princeton.

The Crimson’s closest brush with an Ivy championship came in 1983-84, when Joe Carrabino ’84-85, the school’s all time leading scorer, dropped 22 points and corralled just over seven rebounds a game to lead Harvard to a 9-5 mark—a game back of the league champion Tigers.

All told, the Crimson has finished in second or alone in third in the league just four times.

Those are the historical skeletons that have dogged the Harvard basketball program for decades and that will continue to surround a talented Crimson squad in the wake of Harvard’s second-place preseason selection.

“Obviously, no one is going to pick us to finish first,” Goffredo says. “We had an improvement last year but we still weren’t where we need to be. In my eyes, though, anything short of winning is not going to be completely acceptable.”

“There have been forty years of building blocks laid down for us, and it’s time for us to capitalize on that,” Beal says.

While Harvard has never won the Ivy title, it has participated in the NCAA tournament. After posting a 19-1 regular season mark—still the school record for most wins in a season—during the 1945-46 campaign, the Crimson earned a berth in the tourney, but lost both of its contests to Ohio State and NYU.

It has been 60 years since Wyndol Gray ’46, who played a season with the Boston Celtics, captained that Crimson squad to a bid in the Big Dance. Few teams in that span have had as good a chance as this Harvard squad to end that drought.

“Up until this year, Zach, Mike and I have always been able to say, ‘Well, we’ve got another year,’ but we realize that this is our last shot,” Stehle says. “We’re never going to get this back.”

Could this Crimson group—one whose seniors and juniors endured a disastrous 4-23 season—finally be the one to hoist that banner to the rafters and shake the dubious distinction that has haunted the program for decades?

“For all of us [seniors], these have been three of our hardest years of basketball,” Stehle says. “It’s kind of been a rollercoaster ride, and we really want to go out on a high note. We’ve been working to this point for a while, and for us to leave on our own terms, that would be really important to all of us.”