Yale, Handsome Dan Stand in Way of Tournament Berth

It won’t be The Game in New Haven this Friday, but it will be something close.

On the last weekend of Ivy League play, Harvard heads to Yale with the opportunity to celebrate a third straight championship. The Bulldogs need to win twice and hope Harvard drops Saturday’s game in Providence to force a playoff. The first step will come at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, where the Bulldogs will have a chance to sweep the season series against Harvard. Unlike the football version, I expect better fans than Captain Morgan and Jack Daniels to attend Friday’s all-important game.

For Tommy Amaker and the Harvard men’s basketball team, a win would avenge its only league loss and cap off one of the most dominant runs in recent conference history. Already having secured a share of its fourth consecutive league title last weekend, Amaker’s Crimson has outscored Ivy League opponents by over 16 points a game thus far this season. That’s not a typo.

A year ago, dear reader, you might remember Princeton being in nearly the same situation. Two wins on the Yale-Brown road trip would have sent Princeton to the tournament. The Tigers lost both, and two Harvard home wins sent the Crimson to the Dance—a turn of events Amaker has surely not let his team forget.

Before we dive into the weekend’s action, I’d like to honor one of the best byproducts of the Harvard-Yale rivalry: the invention of a live mascot. Jealous of the Crimson bandanas the Harvard crew wore in 1889, a Yale student decided his team needed a snappier emblem of team pride. The undergrad bought an English bulldog, named him Handsome Dan, and paraded him across the field before Eli sporting events.

Thus far, not counting my father—who boasts the moniker as a personal nickname—there have been 17 dogs to hold the position of Handsome Dan. Important criteria for bulldog selection: the canine must have negative reactions both to the color crimson and to tigers, it has to keep itself clean, and it must bark in the affirmative when asked about its Rhodes Scholarship.

While The Hartford Courant described the original Dan as “a cross between an alligator and a horned frog,” his followers have had more success. Dan IX appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1956, and Dan X—colloquially known as “Bayside Woodnought”—was sired. Two Dans later, the bulldog was stolen by four Princeton undergrads posing as Yale cheerleaders. The cheerleaders-turned-thieves hid the dog in New York while running away from authorities in what was likely the best Step Up script never written.

The early Dans got to Harvard, however. In 1908, before a 4-0 Harvard win in The Game, football coach Percy Haughton was rumored to have strangled a bulldog doll to death to motivate his team to beat Yale.

The rivalry has simmered since then, but on Friday, everything will once again be on the line. Time to play ball.

On to the games.

PENN V. COLUMBIA

This Penn team has underwhelmed in a season in which many expected it to compete for the league’s top spot. How underwhelming? When your school newspaper runs a column titled “I, for one, welcome our new Crimson overlords,” there are two possibilities.

A. You’ve lost to Harvard one too many times for the faithful.

B. Dragons have invaded Philadelphia, and you’re preemptively surrendering.Either way, no news would be good news.

Pick: Columbia

PRINCETON V. CORNELL

Like all good Cornell alums, I’ll take a page out of Andy Bernard’s book and harken back to Cornell’s not-so-recent glory days. Players from the 2010 Big Red team, most notable for making the Sweet 16, are getting back together to compete in a national five-on-five tournament with $500,000 on the line. The tournament ranks teams by how many online “fans” they have, and Cornell ranks just ahead of “James and the Dudes”—which is self-described as “some friends straight outta Wallingford” and is probably made up of guys that call bank on free throws. Go crazy, Jeff Foote.

Pick: Princeton

DARTMOUTH V. BROWN

The Big Green is the argument against the Ivy League regular season format. While the 14-game season makes every contest increasingly important, teams fall out of contention early and have no last shot to make it up. Since the turn of the century, Dartmouth has entered every final conference weekend—and in all but three years, the last two conference weekends—eliminated from title competition.That said, with a program that in 2010 had its entire team sign and deliver a paper to the administration threatening to boycott a weekend game unless its coach was fired, maybe an end-of-season tournament would do little to help.

Pick: Brown

HARVARD V. YALE

On the court, the matchup between Yale junior guard Armani Cotton and Harvard junior wing Wesley Saunders could be the deciding one. Last year, Saunders averaged 14.5 points against Yale on 75 percent shooting in two wins but hit just 6-of-17 shots against the Bulldogs for a hard-earned 16 points in the teams’ first showdown this season. Cotton had his first double-double of the season in Cambridge, scoring 13 points (on just five shots) and grabbing 10 rebounds. Yale is 7-3 this season when he scores in double digits. Cotton had just one point, missing all eight field goals, in last week’s loss to Princeton. To save the Bulldogs’ season, he must step up.

Pick: Harvard

PRINCETON V. COLUMBIA

A game between two teams headed in very opposite directions. Columbia’s only graduating senior hasn’t come off the bench this year, and Princeton will lose four players, including Ivy League Player of the Year candidate T.J. Bray, after this season. The Tigers are much better than their record, having lost four of its six league games by a combined 11 points, but Columbia boasts two of the conference’s top 10 players in junior forward Alex Rosenberg and sophomore guard Maodo Lo. Under coach Kyle Smith, the Lions are on a clear upswing.

Pick: Columbia

PENN V. CORNELL

This will be the second game of the weekend with two African-American head coaches squaring off, a byproduct of the Ivy League’s uniquely diverse coaching body. By comparison, the Big 10 and Big 12 will have a combined two such matchups this year. However, Friday’s game in Ithaca matches up the only two coaches in the conference on the hot seat.

It’s rare to get fired in the Ivy League—former Harvard coach Frank Sullivan owns the distinction of owning the most wins and losses in the Ancient Eight—but both Jerome Allen and Bill Courtney have taken over powerhouses and have been unable to vault their programs back into the conference’s upper echelon. Longtime Penn Director of Athletics Steve Bilsky announced he would retire in June, and his replacement may want his own guy. A recent Daily Pennsylvanian article in which a quoted alum speculated that “it is possible that Jerome…is not the right fit to be our head coach” will not make anything better for Allen.

As for Courtney, everything has gone wrong this year. Playing a motivated Penn senior Miles Jackson-Cartwright won’t help.

Pick: Penn

DARTMOUTH V. YALE

Last October, news broke that Yale students had taken to defecating in laundry hampers, presumably soiling a perfectly good ensemble of dark blue polos and light brown trousers. This Tuesday, Bulldog students once again tarnished a sacred space. As if the Poopetrator-ruined laundry was not enough, a student crawling through the lower level of a Yale library wrapped in a red sleeping bag redefined the meaning of Lamonster. Logically, one student screamed and called it a snake; another thought it was poisonous.I do say, Howard, we must call the authorities. The ruffians are at it again.

Pick: Yale

HARVARD V. BROWN

Last time Harvard visited Providence, Brown coach Mike Martin had this to say after his team lost: “Are they a better team than us? Absolutely. Should we compete better than we did tonight? Absolutely. It’s unacceptable.” Since then, Brown has been 11-6 in the Ivy League and hasn’t lost any of those games by more than 10 points. It’s not quite the Dennis Green tantrum, but Martin’s rage has worked wonders.

Pick: Harvard

PENN V. PRINCETON

When this matchup was first announced, everybody thought it was going to feature two elite teams playing for what would be regional superiority. Fans experienced nostalgia for the glory days of the two squads, one of which had arguably the league’s best player. Quickly though, it became apparent that this game wouldn’t live up to the hype or the ones that came before it. Truly a shame.When put in those terms, Space Jam 2 sounds a lot like next Wednesday’s Penn-Princeton matchup, doesn’t it?

Pick: Princeton

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.