AROUND THE IVIES: Battle Over Championship Ensues in Final Weekend

­It’s not The Game but it’s certainly The Rematch.

When Yale visits Harvard this Friday at Lavietes, it brings more than SportsCenter and sweater vests in tow. The game between the league’s two co-leaders is not only the de facto Ivy League championship game, but a chance for Yale to end Harvard’s hegemony atop the Ancient Eight.

In fact, it’s the most important game in modern Yale basketball history.

Hold with me, dear reader. Yes, Yale has played for national championships before—winning in 1901 and 1903. Yes, it did compete in the first five-on-five game of college basketball history—moving away from the seven- and nine-man lineups of the 1890s.

It has won four Ivy League championships, but just one since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 40 teams and Magic beat Bird in the 1979 final—the widely-accepted beginning of the modern era of college basketball. Its 2002 championship was split three ways, with Yale winning the first playoff game and losing the second. Since the Elis last won a title outright, four alumni have called the White House home.

To properly quantify the team’s struggles, this week I collected the point margins—both in conference and overall—for each Ivy League team going back to the 1979-1980 season. Over that stretch, Yale has been the epitome of good but not great. In fact, from 1980 to 2014, Yale had the best combined point margin (at roughly -0.9 points a game) of any team not named Penn or Princeton. It has won 242 conference games in that span, 10 more than fourth-place Harvard but nearly 100 behind second-place Princeton.

Since current coach James Jones arrived in 1999, the numbers look a bit better. Including this year's number, Yale has 128 conference wins in that span, six more than fourth-place (and next-best) Harvard. Along with Harvard, Penn, and Princeton, it is the only team to post a positive-point margin. By comparison, Dartmouth, the Ivy League’s punching bag, has lost games by an average of eight points over the same time.

Given what Jones inherited—a 4-22 team whose -10.6 points per game conference margin was the 15th worst (fifth percentile) in my sample—his rebuilding job hasn’t been given enough credit. Yale has finished in the league’s top half in every season since 2008, something only Princeton can also say.

His work has been overshadowed, however, by the man coaching Yale’s bitter rival. This is why 2002 isn’t the same as 2015—why any Yale basketball game in the last 40 years doesn’t compare to now. When Yale struggled in the 80s, it was losing to the likes of Princeton and Penn. Now it’s sitting at home watching Harvard every March, and nothing else compares.

While Jones has yet to win a championship, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker inherited one of the league’s worst teams in 2007 and quickly put together a juggernaut. While Harvard is going for a fifth straight conference championship, Yale has had its head slammed up against a glass ceiling for the better part of a decade.

If the Bulldogs are going to break through, Friday night is their best chance. In junior forward Justin Sears, Yale has arguably the best interior player and defender in the Ivy League with shooters  like Armani Cotton, Javier Duren, and Jack Montague to keep defenses honest. Freshman Makai Mason has been a revelation as a sixth man, and the Bulldogs twice fought back from second-half deficits last weekend to get here.

They won in Cambridge last year, briefly taking control of the league before a late season collapse. In an eerily similar situation, Harvard won the league title on Yale’s home floor—celebrating in effusive fashion. Jones, Sears, and co. would like nothing better than to return the favor—and finally break through—Friday.

On to the picks:

COLUMBIA AT PENN

The two schools have been in Ivy League athletics news recently for all the wrong reasons. Penn underwent the shame of watching its coach of nearly 20 years supposedly retire from football altogether…and then join the Columbia football program only three weeks later.

Columbia, well, has student newspapers writing columns celebrating losses from December. Slack has to be given, however, now that the Spectator’s previous favorite subject—a turbulent football coach who coached like Madden’s Rookie Mode and took criticism like the Currier Ten-Man—is gone.

Pick: Columbia

CORNELL AT PRINCETON

While this is Cornell senior forward Shonn Miller’s last weekend in the Ivy League, it is likely not his final college basketball contests. Miller, who was honored last weekend by Cornell at senior night, has another year of eligibility since he sat out last season with injury; like former Ivy League players Andrew Van Nest ’12 and Dwight Tarwater, Miller is victim to the Ivy League’s policy of forbidding graduate student participation.

Before he shows up as the seventh man on a fringe tournament team from a Big Five conference, Miller has a chance to lay waste to a Princeton front line that Justin Sears devastated last weekend. A winnable sweep of the Penn/Princeton trio would be a memorable and fitting end to Miller’s excellent career.

Of course, seeing as Miller’s own university paper misspelled his name in its lede after arguably the most important victory of his career, he may need to average 60 points a game this weekend or “Shaun Miller” is going to be grabbing the headlines.

Pick: Princeton

BROWN AT DARTMOUTH

Captain Morgan and Jack Daniels—two fans who manage to show up at every intense college basketball game—will be in Cambridge Friday night. It’s unclear what’s going to be a bigger deterrent to their arrival in Hanover—the college’s new hard alcohol policy or the team’s dispiriting play, as the team hasn’t won more than 10 Ivy League games since 1980. At 5-7, and with senior Gabas Maldunas out the door, it may be a while still.

Pick: Dartmouth

YALE AT HARVARD

It was a classic on the gridiron, and smart money is on another close contest is Cambridge. Harvard is 60-4 since the beginning of the 2010-2011 season at home, and will have a roaring student section behind it. It led Yale almost wire-to-wire in New Haven and if it can take an early lead, its suffocating defense will be enough.

Pick: Harvard

COLUMBIA AT PRINCETON

Crazy statistic courtesy of Kevin Whitaker: Princeton led by multiple possessions in the second half of every game in February, but finished the month just 4-4. It welcomes Columbia, who bid its seniors goodbye with a pair of tough home losses to Dartmouth and Harvard last weekend.

When these teams last met, it looked like the winner might challenge Harvard and Yale at the top of the standings. Now it just feels like a sad battle to make the CIT.

Pick: Princeton

CORNELL AT PENN

Once upon a time, Cornell-Penn was one of the most dominant rivalries of the Ivy League. The teams have met 122 times on the gridiron for the Trustees’ Cup. Although the title of trophy says quite a bit about Ivy League athletics, it doesn’t speak to the current quality of the rivalry. The two schools ran off six consecutive championships between them in the early part of the century, but look poised to trade spots in the league basement this year.

The teams bring the best out of each other—Penn’s best performance of the year was its win in Ithaca, and last year’s 2-26 Cornell team played Penn within seven points in both meetings.

That’s a bigger feat than it sounds—last year’s Cornell team, judging by average overall point margin, was the worst in the last 35 years of the Ivy League. This year’s Penn team? Well, its -10.75 average conference point margin would just barely crack the top-15 worst teams since 1980.

I do say, Howard, I think I spot a silver lining on that dumpster fire.

Pick: Cornell

YALE AT DARTMOUTH

In one of the weekend’s more surprising turns, the Big Green swept the Gentleman’s C’s in dominating fashion. As unlikely as it seemed two weeks ago, Dartmouth has a chance to finish third in the Ivy League standings. However, even if Yale loses Friday, it has something to play for against Dartmouth this year. Sears, Duren, and co. curb-stomped the Big Green to the tune of a 15-point lead in New Haven, and look for a similar result here.

Pick: Yale

BROWN AT HARVARD

Last year, Harvard came off a victory over Yale and played lethargic the next night, pulling out an overtime victory in Providence by the skin of its teeth. History ran it back this year, as Harvard once again needed overtime to get a February victory at Brown. In this game, held on Senior Night, Harvard will need to win regardless to take home the title.

The Harvard seniors are looking for their fourth consecutive outright League championship, a virtually unprecedented achievement. Making the NCAA Tournament four years in a row is hard for even the most successful programs; since Harvard made the Dance for the first time three years ago, Kentucky, Indiana, and Georgetown—each college basketball royalty—have each missed it once.

Possibly the most impressive statistic about this group is that with two games to go, they’ve outscored their average Ivy League opponent by 10 points a game. That is nearly twice as good as the next closest squad—Princeton at 5.86 points a game.

When the horn sounds Saturday, these seniors will walk off the court and right into history.

Pick: Harvard

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