Ivy League Basketball News

In a preview of tonight’s game against Penn, the Philadelphia Inquirer discusses Tommy Amaker’s turnaround of the Harvard program.

In just his third season with the Crimson, Amaker is spearheading one of the unlikeliest revivals in college hoops.

“To have it kind of take shape is really nice for all of us to see that happen,” Amaker said of the team’s success. “And still we are nowhere near we want to be.”

At this point, they’re closer to that goal than Penn (5-20, 4-7).

The traditional league power is posting one of the worst campaigns in school history.

The Crimson defeated the Quakers, 80-66, a month ago in Cambridge. A win tonight would enable Harvard to win both season games with Penn for the first time since back-to-back seasons in 1941 and 1942.

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The Yale Daily News previews Yale’s Senior Weekend games against Columbia and Cornell.

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The New Republic reviews “Outside the Limelight: Basketball in the Ivy League.”

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Since this site have gotten several Google hits in the past hour about “Thamel Harvard” (apparently, quite a few people are following the Twitter war between Thamel and Torre), here are those NYT articles Pete Thamel wrote about Harvard’s basketball recruiting scandal two years ago:

March 2, 2008: “In a New Era at Harvard, A Question of Standards”

March 11, 2008: “Highly Recruited Center No Longer Set to Attend Harvard”

September 27, 2008: “Amaker’s Move Creates a Clash of Harvard Ideals”

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New York Times college sports reporter Pete Thamel attended the Columbia @ Cornell game in Ithaca last week and had a few things to say about Cornell, Harvard, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker, and NYT Quad blogger Jon Jaques during a halftime chat with WVBR’s Barry Leonard. Transcripts of relevant excerpts of his interview are posted below.  The audio is available to anyone with a Cornell Redcast subscription and access to the Columbia @ Cornell game.

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BL: [Syracuse coach] Jim Boeheim, you tell me, had effervescent praise for Cornell. Those clubs of course met early in the season.

PT: Sure. Unprompted — this is now on Thursday before they played West Virginia — he said that Cornell was the second best team that Syracuse has played behind Pitt who is obviously Syracuse’s only loss … and he said, you know, if he were seating them he thinks Cornell’s a 4 or 5 or 6 seed. He said the RPI is stupid because you don’t become a bad team because you play bad teams. Cornell’s RPI will obviously be hurt in the Ivy League because the Ivy League teams don’t, most of them don’t have high RPIs. He said that what the committee sometimes need to do is just look at teams, that if you look at Cornell, you can see that they’re a very good team. He called Wittman a very good college player, an excellent college player; he said Wroblewski could play anywhere he wants in the country. He really likes Dale, your seniors, there are a lot of good pieces here. He was very complimentary of what Steve had done.

BL: You first saw the Cornell experience when you rode the bus with us two years ago, the Harvard-Dartmouth weekend and the miracle finish. You saw these guys as sophomores, matured now as seniors. Your impressions on Cornell and what it means for the Ivy League and let alone Harvard doing what they’re doing.

PT: Yes I think this is an up year for the Ivy League. There’s no question. The maturity of this group has been great. .. They have a legitimate 7-footer who’s a very good college player. They have a four-year starter and point guard basically in Louis Dale… They’re experienced, they have a lot of depth. I’m very happy for Jon Jaques who blogs for us on the Quad Blog on NYTimes.com. He scored 8 points last season, all last season he scored 8 points and he had 20 in the garden to beat St. John’s. I can never remember a player in college basketball being a nonfactor for 3 years and then coming in and being a star. He’s been a flat out star for Steve and really won them that game. I didn’t see the St. Joseph’s game but he was a huge factor in that game too. To credit a kid for coming in, you usually tuck your tail in sometimes… and Jon didn’t do that and it’s paid off for him.

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BL: Back to the Ivy League and Harvard. You’re all over the circuit with this. You obviously did a series of stories on the Harvard situation. That too seems to have pretty much passed and settled down and Tommy Amaker slowly building his program. And you look at next year with all these Cornell graduates and you can see where that program is going.

PT: They’ll be the favorite next year I would say… The knock on Tommy Amaker has always been his bench coaching and his game coaching. It was like that at Michigan especially; the other coaches in the league did not have a lot of respect for his bench coaching. In Ivy League when teams know each other so well — look what Zach Spiker and Army did to them the other night — that will be the best test for Tommy because it’s all very fragile and one bad weekend as you know in the Ivy League could cost their season. Last year they were fairly good but then they lost to Dartmouth and kinda tailspinned from there and can they perform consistently enough throughout the whole grind?

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The New York Post profiles Harvard's Tommy Amaker

Today’s Games:
Cornell @ Columbia, 7 PM.  Game notes/ previews: Cornell, Columbia
Harvard @ Dartmouth, 7 PM.  Game notes/ previews:  Harvard, Dartmouth

Bloomberg.com reports that the Ivy League may be looking for a TV deal.

Read about last night’s Yale-Brown game in the New Haven Register and the Providence Journal.

The Ithaca Journal previews how Cornell’s multi-faceted point guards will help them in today’s game against Columbia.

The Columbia Spectator profiles Cornell’s Ryan Wittman.

TheFacts.com, a Brazoria County TX news site, writes about the arrest of former Angleton Brazoria TX high school basketball star Garrett Brown for marijuana possession and intent to distribute.

• According to a representative of the Dartmouth Varsity Athletics Communication staff, Brown had left the Dartmouth basketball team in December to focus on a music career and had signed a recording contract.  Because Brown had left the team, no disciplinary action was taken.  Marlon Sanders, who was arrested along with Brown, was suspended and booted from the team.

The New York Post profiles Harvard coach Tommy Amaker.

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Tommy Amaker and Jeremy Lin talk to the Boston Herald about the costs and benefits of a tough pre-season schedule, and how it helps them prepare for the Ivy tournament. Excerpts from “High Marks for Harvard”:

Before the season, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker was asked about the challenging nonconference slate he had arranged for his team and joked, “Maybe I’ve lost my mind.”

No one thinks Amaker is crazy now that the Crimson are 10-3. It’s the best start in program history, highlighted by a win at Boston College for the second straight year.

“We want to show our current guys that we want to play these kinds of games. We want to show recruits that we’re changing the makeup of our scheduling and our program,” said Amaker, who also noted the financial benefits, as bigger programs pay a sum to smaller teams in the place of returning a home game. “Those things really help us to keep things in order here.”

As Harvard continues to improve, it could have more difficulty scheduling top opponents. Major conference teams are happy to play smaller programs for a guaranteed win, but most are less inclined to offer up a payday to an upstart.

“Those will be good problems for us to start having around here,” Amaker said. “I’m not sure that we have that problem yet, but if that does develop in that way, obviously the reason is that we’ve gotten pretty good and people have given us that kind of attention and respect and may not want to play.”

Star guard Jeremy Lin believes these first two months will pay off when the Ivy schedule starts Saturday against Dartmouth.

“I think it’s definitely helping our confidence getting out there and playing some mid-major and some high-major teams,” Lin said. “We still understand (Ivy favorite) Cornell is doing better than us in the preseason, so we understand what we have in front of us.”

Read the full article here.

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Philly.com’s Dick Jerardi speculates on KenPom’s stats about Philly teams, including Penn:

So, what about Penn? Well, the projection is 3-25, 2-12 Ivy. The good news is that the Quakers have only a 2.19 percent chance of going winless.

Again, the projection can’t account for the coaching change. Glen Miller is out and Jerome Allen is in. Or the possibility that Tyler Bernardini will be back at some point.

It is difficult to quantify how a group of players will react to different voices in practice and in meetings. Anybody who understands the situation knows that Penn needed a change. We shall see how much it mattered over time.

Update: Rivals.com has the story “Amaker, Lin have Harvard thinking big”:

“I just thought of the potential magic that could happen with a brand name like Harvard,” Amaker said. “We’d never won the Ivy League in men’s basketball. That in itself was enticing as well. We’re the oldest school in the country. To say something’s never been done here is quite a statement.”

Harvard’s depth has helped the Crimson lead the Ivy League in scoring margin (plus-9.2), field-goal percentage (.483), field-goal percentage defense (.390), 3-point percentage defense (.295) and blocks (5.9). Harvard and Columbia are tied for the league lead in rebound margin (plus-2.7).

Washington Post: Hoyas Preparing for Harvard’s do-Everything Lin

Beware Harvard’s Lin-chpin.

Just four days after Old Dominion bounced Georgetown from college basketball’s unbeaten ranks, the Crimson come calling, and they boast Harvard’s hottest commodity since Matt Damon….

Bloomberg.com: “Harvard Basketball Faces Georgetown After Best Start Since 1984″

Harvard University, the oldest and wealthiest U.S. school, hired Tommy Amaker three years ago to build a basketball program that would compete for Ivy League championships. The investment is paying off. The Crimson, 7-2, have their best start in 25 years and face No. 14 Georgetown University today.

… “We’re not a nationally ranked team, yet,” Amaker said. “But we certainly believe it’s possible. The institution has put the pillars in place. We have a vision. We’re going to do this.”

… Wright, a sophomore psychology major from Suffolk, Virginia, who carries a 3.0 grade-point average, said he chose Harvard over Illinois, Virginia Tech, George Mason and each of the other seven Ivy League schools.

“At Harvard, it was about making history,” said Wright, who scored a career-high 21 points in the win over Boston College. “All the other coaches talked about being part of history, but Harvard doesn’t have any history.

CBSSports, ESPN and others have posted a preview of the game.

“We are preparing for this game no differently than we did for Bryant or Rice,” Wright said of Harvard’s earlier victories. “We can’t think of Georgetown as being, ‘Oh my gosh, these players are so great.’ They are basketball players. But hey, so are we.

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