Around the Ivies: Harvard Aims to Sweep Up Ivy League This Weekend

Some of my fondest memories of growing up are playing sports with my two younger brothers. While teaming up with them against our neighbors or cousins in street hockey, basketball, and wiffle ball was a thrill, I think I derived even more joy from being able to count on a win when I played against them in various backyard sports, oftentimes with rules that I made up, for much of my adolescent life.

Like all good things, using the fact that I was further along developmentally to teach the youth a lesson eventually did catch up with me. Those two-handed dunks on the hoop in our bedroom began being blocked and those wiffle balls that I promised I wasn’t throwing my hardest eventually began landing in our neighbor’s creek. While my middle brother is playing club baseball in college and the other is a two-sport high school athlete, I’m writing from a glorified fallout shelter contemplating whether I should run off my most recent Felipe’s burrito. But I swear it wasn’t always this way.

The Brown men’s basketball team knows a thing or two about what it’s like to be a little brother. In recent years, the Bears have received worse treatment from Harvard than even nine-year-old me could have imagined giving my brothers.

In fact, since Tommy Amaker took over in 2007, the Crimson is 15-3 against the Bears, its best record against any Ivy League opponent. Part of the reason why Brown may be so good at playing the role of Harvard’s younger brother is because it almost exclusively recruits players who are already used to doing it. Brown coach Mike Martin probably has the top roster in the nation when it comes to players living in their older brothers’ shadows.

Steven Spieth has all the ingredients to be a successful Ivy League small forward—he’s 6’6”, is a lethal three-point shooter, and is an above-average rebounder. However, the Jesuit-educated Spieth will always be known as the younger brother of 2015 PGA Tour Player of the Year Jordan Spieth. The Bears’ leading scorer could score 64 points in tonight’s game and it would immediately bring me back to the 64 his older brother shot at Augusta in 2015.

Joshua Howard is a key piece in Martin’s freshman recruiting class. The most famous person in Howard’s family is his father, Juwan, an NBA All-Star, two-time NBA Champion, and member of Michigan’s Fab Five, but his older brother, Juwan Jr., is no slouch.

Juwan Howard, Jr. averaged 17.8 points per game over his final two seasons at the University of Detroit and played on the Miami Heat’s summer league team two summers ago.

While Brown sophomore guard Obi Okolie presumably has big feet, he’s going to need them because of the legacy left by his older brother, Agunwa (Harvard ’16), last season’s Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year. The elder Okolie posted a perfect 8-0 record against the Bears in his four-year career with the Crimson.

Sophomore guard Chris Sullivan is the shortest of a trio of brothers who have all played at Brown. Like many players for the Bears, Chris has had a less illustrious career than those of his siblings. His older brothers, Peter and Matthew, were both 1,000-point scorers in college. Chris only needs 942 more points to make it into the exclusive club.

While Brown junior guard Patrick Triplett does not in fact have two twin brothers, if he did, one would probably be an Olympic skier and the other would have just won a championship with the Cavaliers.

A starting five composed of Jordan Spieth, Juwan Howard, Jr., the two oldest Sullivan brothers, and Agunwa Okolie could not only handily defeat this year’s Dartmouth team but would also be my pick to bring home a Ryder Cup crowd.

In addition to recruiting players with famous older brothers, Martin is fond of bringing players he sees as versatile into the fold. He described three of his underclassmen with that adjective in this year’s media guide.

Claiming that a 6’1” point guard who is shooting 30.6 percent from three and has more turnovers and personal fouls than he does assists is versatile is like trying to make the same argument about Meek Mill.

As an aside, I love Meek—he shot the music video for Ima Boss outside of my high school and is a fixture at Sixers game—but sometimes Dreamchasers can feel like one 70-minute song.

When he arrived on campus in the fall of 2015, sophomore forward Travis Fuller stated that the reason he chose Brown was “to win a championship.” While his ambitions may be a tad unrealistic, there is no denying that the Bears are better than they have been in quite some time and that Martin has his alma mater on the right track.

Brown accounted for two of Harvard’s six Ivy League wins last year and went 3-11 in conference play last season. The Bears already have two conference wins this year and blew out a Holy Cross team that handed the Crimson a home loss earlier in the season.

To see how far Brown has come in a year, one only has to look at the decreased load that senior guard Tavon Blackmon has had to shoulder since four freshmen arrived in Providence this fall.

Blackmon was a do-everything guard for Martin last season, averaging 13.3 points and 5.5 assists in 34.4 minutes per game last year. The Gonzaga College High School graduate averaged 18 points when facing Harvard in two games last season.

Blackmon is still a key piece for the 2016-2017 Bears but other players have stepped up. Spieth is averaging 16.2 points per game and seven players are averaging more than 7.5 points per game.

Five underclassmen log at least 14 minutes a game for Martin. The Bears enter Friday’s contest with an 11-11 record and has allowed exactly the same number of points as they have scored. The last time Brown was above .500 before this season was when the team was 9-8 on Jan. 12, 2015.

Friday’s contest largely feels like a trap game for the Crimson for several reasons. First, the Bears are easy to overlook from a historical point of view. The last time that Brown beat Harvard, the Crimson’s leading scorer, freshman guard Bryce Aiken, was in fifth grade.

To add to the distractions, the game is on the road exactly 24 hours before one of the Crimson’s most important games of the season. Saturday’s contest comes against Yale, the team’s biggest rival, and the only Ancient Eight foe that beat Harvard twice last season.

The Crimson has not won both games of a road Ivy League weekend since Harvard beat the Bears and Bulldogs over two years ago.

Sophomore guard Corey Johnson often alludes to how important it is for the young Crimson team to play a full 40 minutes. Harvard has yet to do so in an Ivy League contest in 2017. The Crimson has found itself trailing at halftime in each of its last five games and has faced double-digit deficits in its last four. Harvard has to make sure that it is not trying to beat Yale before the team bus pulls into New Haven since Brown is 9-4 in games it is leading at halftime.

Finally, early February is prime upset season. Four of the nation’s top ten teams have lost since the calendar flipped. Princeton and Yale are the only Ivy League teams who bring perfect February records into the month’s second weekend.

While this year’s Crimson team will largely be remembered for how it fares against the Bulldogs, Tigers, and in the Ivy League Tournament, it needs to beat the Bears for those moments to matter.

Losing to Princeton in heartbreaking fashion last Saturday could be exactly the wake-up call that Harvard needs to avoid a slow start this weekend. We will learn a lot about the Crimson this weekend. We will learn whether it takes last Saturday’s loss as motivation to bulldoze the Bears or as an excuse for a slow start. We will learn how this young roster prepares for a weekend in which Saturday is a rivalry game and potential Ivy League Tournament matchup while the night before is projected as a mere formality. Ultimately, we will learn how fast Harvard’s little brother is growing up.

Now to the picks:

HARVARD AT BROWN

Perhaps I was a bit too harsh on Brown the last time around—sure it was blown out by nearly fifty the last time it reached the NCAA Tournament, but the past is in the past. We like to focus on the present here at The Crimson.

A recent article from The Brown Daily Herald—perhaps Providence’s most esteemed news source—suggests the university is at odds with itself, arguing that the growth of its graduate schools “Puts Brown’s Identity Into Question.” Tough stuff right there. I think this is also applicable to the school’s basketball team. The Bears are a team whose identity is largely “Our Small Forward is Jordan Spieth’s brother.”

When the program can move past this, maybe it can get past Harvard, too.

Pick: Harvard

COLUMBIA AT PENN

During the American Revolution, Pennsylvania’s Quakers found themselves at odds. As their pledge to nonviolence conflicted with the ongoing fighting all around, they instead found peaceful ways to support the ongoing revolution.

Wikipedia—America’s most esteemed news source—notes that the Quakers “participated in the revolutionary movement through nonviolent actions such as embargoes and other economic protests.”

The Quakers of 2017 have a lot in common with their ancestors. They’re a bunch of really passive guys watching a season of Ivy League basketball fly by before their eyes. Sitting at 0-5 in conference, maybe Penn should consider changing its mascot.

Pick: Columbia

CORNELL AT PRINCETON

In a surprising turn of events, Cornell gave Yale a run for its money last weekend. In a game that saw a ridiculous 18 lead changes and two teams from some of the worst places in America face off, it was ultimately the Bulldogs that came out on top. Similarly, Harvard found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against Princeton, so the Tigers come into this one without a conference loss.

Personally I’d love to call an upset here. I think orange and black make for a hideous combination of colors, but you have to hand it to the Tigers. They lost a First Team All-Ivy pick in senior Henry Caruso but have kept rolling.

Despite a nearly embarrassing loss to Dartmouth last Friday, they’re still the conference favorites.

Pick: Princeton

DARTMOUTH AT YALE

It finally happened. No, Penn didn’t finally snag a conference win, but because of that, Dartmouth did. That’s just kind of what happens when you put two winless teams against one another.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Dartmouth is now a year removed from its historic hard alcohol ban. The Dartmouth—a news source whose only claim to fame is that it’s really old—suggests, “80 percent indicated that they do not think the hard alcohol ban has been successful in lowering high-risk drinking on campus.”

What a shame. I know most seasons of Dartmouth basketball are pretty unbearable, but trying to get through them with just a beer has probably been even worse.

Cheers to a dry Hanover and maybe next year.

Pick: Yale

COLUMBIA AT PRINCETON

I know people can go on for hours about how anyone in the Ivy League can win on a given night. It’s true, but frankly the picks this week seem oddly easy. There are a bunch of teams with a lot of conference wins taking on a bunch teams with not a lot of conference wins.

Hope you followed that.

This game, however, isn’t particularly easy to call. Sure, Princeton is undefeated, but the Tigers have also shown that they’re beatable, particularly this past weekend against Harvard and Dartmouth.To find the answer to this dilemma I’ve looked to nature. Specifically, I just Googled “In a fight would a lion or a tiger win?”

While answers abound, I found a relatively credible source that suggests, “The contest of the lion against the tiger was a classic pairing, and the betting usually favored the tiger. At the end of the 19th century, the Gaekwad of Baroda arranged a fight between a lion and tiger before an audience of thousands. The Gaekwad favored the lion, and as a result had to pay 37,000 rupees as the lion was mauled by the tiger.”

I’d prefer not to put any rupees on this one, but if I had to I guess, the tiger mauls the lion.

Pick: Princeton

DARTMOUTH AT BROWN

Having a degree of separation from Jordan Spieth has to be good for something.

Well either that or the Big Green comes into this one hot off their its conference victory of the season.

Just kidding. Let’s go with the Spieth thing.

Pick: Brown

HARVARD AT YALE

During the 133rd playing of The Game something particularly unexpected happened. No, I’m not talking about the strange mating ritual Yalies do at the end of the third quarter. I’m talking about the fact that Yale won. I don’t know the details, but I do know that it had been a while.

I’d like to think history doesn’t repeat itself.

Pick: Harvard

—Staff writer Troy Boccelli can be reached at troy.boccelli@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Stephen J. Gleason can be reached at stephen.gleason@thecrimson.com.