AROUND THE IVIES: Yale Overtakes Harvard as League Favorite

The king is dead, and his prince is in charge.

The first back-to-back weekend of Ivy League play was as much confirmation as coronation. Harvard, which now ranks last in all of Division I in free throw percentage, stumbled to two home losses in eminently winnable contests against the Gentleman’s C’s, the last a buzzer-beater from Columbia senior Alex Rosenberg after Harvard missed consecutive free throws down the stretch with an opportunity to put the Lions away.

If inconsistency was the story of Harvard’s weekend, dominance was the tale for the Bulldogs. After jumping all over the Quakers on Friday, Yale raced out to a double-digit lead against Princeton at home and held off the tricky Tigers down the stretch. With co-leader Columbia coming to town this weekend, the Bulldogs have a good shot to put distance between themselves and the field. Since Yale plays six of its last eight games on the road, it will need that cushion.

Princeton, whose multifaceted group of wings has given everyone trouble so far, lurks as a dark horse. The Tigers have a rough two-game stretch at Columbia and versus Yale in mid-February but a manageable schedule bracketing those contests. Forward Henry Caruso, the Ivy League’s third-leading scorer, has emerged to supplement a bevy of outside threats who all shoot well from distance and drive the line. Were it not for the disappointing early returns on Spencer Cook’s season (39.3 percent from the field, 30.2 percent from three), this team might easily be the favorite.

The existence of a clear top three muddles the picture for the league’s middle class. Even without Robert Hatter, Cornell pulled off an improbable sweep last weekend behind career nights from freshman Matt Morgan. After an electric win over Harvard, Dartmouth has shifted down from turbocharge to neutral.

And then there is Harvard. With a bit better free throw shooting—and a healthier Zena Edosomwan—the Crimson might easily be 3-1 and on the heels of a Yale team that visits Cambridge last weekend. As Amaker told The Daily Pennsylvanian this week, “If we shoot free throws better.... I think the narrative of this team is different.”

Yet free throws aren’t Harvard’s only issue. Since nearly defeating No. 7 Kansas in December, Harvard has had leads in every second half—including against No. 1 Oklahoma—but an inability to stop opponent momentum has doomed them. Too often one basket has become three. Columbia ran off a 16-4 run in the second half against Harvard, nearly matching Dartmouth’s 27-6 spurt and Oklahoma’s 27-2 stretch.

With January lineups that alternatively missed Edosomwan, freshman Corey Johnson, and senior Patrick Steeves, Harvard has been unable to maintain its rhythm. For a team that boasts the best win of any Ivy (BYU) and three close losses to top-15 teams, the slow start is especially frustrating. Its reward—a trip to a stadium where it has won just twice in 27 years—is hardly consolation.

Yet, Harvard has no choice but to find that form again; while it may already be out of the Ivy League title race, another loss or two would seal the coffin door.

On to the picks.

COLUMBIA AT YALE

The league’s only two undefeated teams tip off the weekend at Payne Whitney, where the Bulldogs boast an 8-0 home record. Yale has been the more dominant team through four games, but Columbia boasts three of the conference’s four most valuable players by Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares metric. The Lions come in as confident as ever after coach Kyle Smith’s first-ever win in Lavietes, arguably the league’s hardest place to play.

Yale can comfort itself in centuries of history, however. It was Yale graduates, after all, who founded King’s College, Columbia’s precursor, in the 1750s. The cause was alarm about the College of New Jersey, now Princeton—the first of many places (Toad’s being the most recent) to cause Yale to question its intellectualism. After King’s College closed during the Revolutionary War, its Loyalist alumni fled, and in the aftermath came the architects of what may be Division I’s worst football team.

Two and a half centuries later, I’m feeling confident picking against the Torys in this one.

Pick: Yale

DARTMOUTH AT PENN

Watching Penn throw up an oh-fer on the Brown-Yale road trip last weekend, I couldn’t help but think about when the Quakers were good at sports. Like the time The New York World-Telegram reported an Ivy League conspiracy to stop playing Penn in football because the Quakers had scheduled Notre Dame. The reason? By playing Notre Dame, Penn would be “condoning” the decadent academic policies of the South Bend institution.

Oh Howard, I do wonder how they might descend from that high horse.

Pick: Dartmouth

CORNELL AT BROWN

By beating Penn, Brown no longer carries the distinction of the league’s only team without a victory. With power forward Cedric Kuakamensah carrying a 9.4 percent block percentage and Steven Spieth distributing and scoring well at the point, the Bears have some interesting pieces. They haven’t yet come together, but on a campus where the football team’s “timeless rivalry” is with URI, I think you’re granted a bit of a longer time horizon to figure things out.

Pick: Cornell

HARVARD AT PRINCETON

From here on out, it appears that every game will be a must-win for the 1-3 Crimson. No team has won the league with a record of 11-3 since Harvard did it three years ago, and even that team shot out of the gates before needing a Princeton collapse on the final weekend. The Crimson has won twice straight at Jadwin after a quarter-century of futility that culminated in an HSAC piece proving the home advantage the Tigers get from Jadwin’s strange lighting backdrop.

Were Charles Eliot, the Harvard president who labeled the curveball as deceptive and thus “not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard," still alive, I daresay he might shoot out that darned backdrop.

Pick: Princeton

CORNELL AT YALE

Matt Morgan could score 50, and I don’t think it’ll matter.

Pick: Yale

COLUMBIA AT BROWN

After an interlude of unbiased news coverage, The Daily Spectator has returned to form. Consistent readers of this column may recall famous columns comparing Lions games to the Super Bowl, celebrating December wins in March, and likening Hanover to a “scene from The Shining.” Daniel Radov is back to make his place in history, calling Alex Rosenberg’s buzzer-beater last Saturday his second “game-winning” shot in three years.

Problem is that the shot Radov refers to was waived off for a foul about which Lions fans are still salty. I’d liken christening it a “game-winner” to calling Justin Bieber a “family figure” or labeling Qdoba a “burrito chain.” Try as hard as we might to imagine that reality, it just ain’t here.

Pick: Brown

DARTMOUTH AT PRINCETON

After seemingly turning the corner against Harvard, the Big Green took a step back last weekend with a sweep at the hands of the Gentleman’s C’s. Against a Tigers team that can’t afford many missteps with the way the Lions and Bulldogs are playing, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Pick: Princeton

HARVARD AT PENN

It is hard to square the sedate basketball rivalry between these two schools with its electric football history. Penn nearly took away Harvard’s undefeated season a year ago before completing the feat last year, nicely priming the Crimson for a ninth consecutive beatdown of Yale.

It was the fourth consecutive year the game had title implications, something that can scarcely be said for the teams’ encounters on the hardwood. Since Zach Rosen patrolled the floor, Penn has routinely been at the bottom of the conference. Firing Jerome Allen last year was a first step, but outside of an overtime effort against Princeton, Penn has looked poor in Ivy League play. Senior Darien-Nelson Henry has steadily become one of the best rebounding big men in the league, but his advanced defensive stats lag behind his impressive box score statistics. Sophomore Sam Jones has stepped up, but he and classmate Antonio Woods are not at the same level as the conference’s best backcourts (Yale, Princeton, Cornell).

It says here this game will be closer than last year, but don’t expect Harvard to bow out easily.

Pick: Harvard

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