OT - CU Basketball

Today's Chicago Tribune prints predictions for the NCAA basketball tournament seedings lifted from Mike Hugenin of the Orlando Sentinel. He has Cornell winning the Ivy League spot! I know they didn't lose any starters from last year and have another big group of freshman, but is the team really that much better than last year? I guess we'll learn a little on Sunday.

I'd love to see the Big Red win the Ivy title this year, but based on the win totals of the last three seasons (7, 5, 8), you have to figure it will be tough.

I'll freely admit I know next to nothing about Ivy League hoops, but from what I've read on the Internet (hey, why not?), I gather that the following is conventional wisdom:

1) The favorites this year are perennial powers Princeton and Penn, along with Yale (who put a scare into #1 UConn a couple of days ago.)

2) Cornell graduated zero impact players last year and has a lot of returning experienced cagers. Ka'Ron Barnes may be the best player in the league.

3) Head coach Steve Donohue has a team with Potential, but eventually will have to start turning that into Wins to be taken seriously.

Cornell plays 26 Division I games this year (plus a Dec. 2 contest against Ithaca College.) Like I said, my basketball knowledge is limited, but I like to see all of Cornell's teams do well. So I'm hoping this will be another "step forward" year for the Big Red. Realistically, though, it's a lot to ask to expect them to go to the NCAA tournament. I'll settle for:

1) 2-4 against the Ivy Big Three (Penn, Princeton, Yale)
2) 4-4 against the Ivy Everyone Else (Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth)
3) 5-7 non-conference

So that's an 11-15 season. Enough to say Cornell's moved forward? Maybe. The Big Red apparently have no depth, so maybe just improving the win total should be seen as progress.

For more info, see the basketball prospectus on www.cornellbigred.com. Also check out www.ivybasketball.com, which looks like a great site. I hope it gets updated this year.

P.S. If the Big Red don't step up this year in Newman Arena, I hear there's a pretty good team that plays its home games next door.

I was just surprised that we were able to get a big time Div I program to play in our "gym." I always thought that big time programs play at "smaller schools" (we're a large school based on population but based on arena size and ability, we're a small school) only for a substantial percentage of the ticket revenue. But I guess it's better to save the tougher opponents for home games...I can't imagine we generate much ticket revenue. Does anyone have any insight on this? Most of my experience with college basketball was with Siena college and their coach is the current coach of Georgia Tech...Anyways, I know coach Donohue promised games against big name teams but I never thought we'd actually get them to come to Ithaca! He certainly has turned me into a fan! Go Big Red!

If I'm not mistaken, we played at Georgia Tech each of the last two seasons, so they owed us one.

Also, in SI's college hoops preview, they mentioned Cornell as an Ivy contender while picking Princeton as the champ: "Junior center Judson Wallace has the range (26 for 72 in treys) to help the Tigers dethrone depleted Penn and hold off the challenge of Cornell."

For what it's worth, Donahue is a hell of a coach and a classy guy in my opinion and he's done a great job with the team...his first recruiting class is now juniors, and hopefully they're all healthy, so they should be very competitive. The ballers deserve some fan support other than the usual Lynah intermission crowd.

Cornell has a basketball team??

Hmmm, curious.

Adam Brown '03 wrote:

I was just surprised that we were able to get a big time Div I program to play in our "gym." I always thought that big time programs play at "smaller schools" (we're a large school based on population but based on arena size and ability, we're a small school) only for a substantial percentage of the ticket revenue. But I guess it's better to save the tougher opponents for home games...I can't imagine we generate much ticket revenue. Does anyone have any insight on this? Most of my experience with college basketball was with Siena college and their coach is the current coach of Georgia Tech...Anyways, I know coach Donohue promised games against big name teams but I never thought we'd actually get them to come to Ithaca! He certainly has turned me into a fan! Go Big Red!

When I was at Cornell we had one at least one big conference school come to Ithaca every year. Over Christmas break. When nobody was around to watch. The two that I remember were Pitt and North Carolina. (When Dean Smith was the coach at UNC he would play a game near the hometown of all of his seniors. They came to Cornell for King Rice (Binghamton, NY) because Binghamton was D-III then, and I figure he didn't like his seniors so much that he would play a game in the Carrier Dome.)