Cornell NCAA Basketball

KenP
There are lots of reasons to think Cornell won't win. That being said, there is no reason to think Cornell can't win.

KenP
There are lots of reasons to think Cornell won't win. That being said, there is no reason to think Cornell can't win.

Swampy
These cats are obviously not history majors.

YankeeLobo
If you had to quantify their chances to beat Kentucky, what number would you put on it? I think 5% is about right. Initially, I had a 25-30% chance to beat Temple and 40% to beat Wisconsin. It's too bad we're not playing Duke, I think we'd be favored to win that game.

Mike Imren
Imagine if Cornell advances to the Final Four in the NCAA Tournament.

The Big Red already is in the Final Sixteen, where Thursday it will meet Kentucky.

"It's a winnable game," Cornell center Jeff Foote was quoted as saying.

You would think that somebody from an Ivy League school would be too intelligent to blurt out something so outrageous.

Then again, maybe Foote knows something we don't. He should after matriculating at such a prestigious institution as Cornell.

Foote, a 7-foot senior, probably figured out on a chalkboard straight out of "Good Will Hunting" the probabilities of beating Kentucky.

Let's say for conversation's sake that the young scholar is on to something and Cornell does beat Kentucky. The outcome could be college basketball's turning point.

Just last week United States education secretary Arne Duncan rattled higher education with a radical proposal.

(First off we'll concede that maybe we shouldn't take Duncan seriously. There was no "i" in basketball when he played for Harvard, but shouldn't he know there's an "i" in Arnie?)

Anyway, Duncan suggested that schools be banned from the NCAA Tournament if they don't graduate at least 40 percent of their players.

Duncan is just another dreamer dreaming up ways to emphasize the left side of the hyphen in student-athlete.

Eggheads everywhere continue to concoct formulas to determine whether college athletes are being educated. Meanwhile, coaches continue to ridicule them.

Like, coaches say, the results are misleading - many players leave early for professional careers - schools are penalized for players who transfer - players are penalized for their predecessors' sins - the dog ate everyone's homework but left the playbook intact -

So graduation rates for black players especially still are unacceptable and, fairly or not, the perception remains that college basketball is no college-level teaching tool.

Then along comes Cornell, the first Ivy League representative in 31 years to advance to the third round of the NCAAs.

Cornell beat Temple by 13 points and Wisconsin by 18 over the weekend. Foote will have to calculate for me how many points that means the Big Red will beat Kentucky by.

If Cornell actually wins that game - crazy, sure, but so was the concept of Ivy Leaguers trouncing teams from the Big Ten and Atlantic-10.

My goodness, if Cornell does beat Kentucky of the SEC, coaches from the Big East to the Pac-10 will have to rethink their recruiting philosophies.

The next thing you know, big-time programs will start pursuing preps whose SAT scores are higher than their shoe sizes. Maybe they'll steer players toward majors like Molecular Science instead of Barn Dancing. Maybe they'll alter high school transcripts downward so basketball brains qualify to live in athletic dorms with football grunts.

All of a sudden players would be mentoring Illinois' Bruce Weber on zone defenses, teaching Kentucky's John Calipari a course in Basic Ethics and giving tips to Duke's Mike Krzyzewski on the proper pronunciation of his name.

Really, folks, college basketball becomes a whole new ballgame if smarty-pants Cornell keeps winning this week.

billhoward
But wasn't our last football game against Michigan a Cornell win, too?

billhoward
Some say Adolph Rupp invited Cornell, knowing that if Kentucky got beaten by a team with blacks, maybe he could go get some of his own. Or it could be revisionist history.

ugarte

billhoward
Some say Adolph Rupp invited Cornell, knowing that if Kentucky got beaten by a team with blacks, maybe he could go get some of his own. Or it could be revisionist history.

That is insane revisionist history. Cornell came to Kentucky the year AFTER getting beaten by Texas Western (now UTEP), the first NCAA champ with an all black starting five, in the NCAA final. I've never heard that Rupp was a progressive victim of a retrograde era.