Fantastic Four Sit Atop Women’s Ivy Basketball Standings

Clutter atop the League

Keeping with the Ivy League tradition of winning at home, Harvard, Dartmouth and Cornell got much-needed separation from the rest of the league with home sweeps this weekend, giving them each 3-1 records in league play. Yale also stands at 3-1 after winning at Columbia and falling at Cornell.

Led by junior guard Emily Tay, who was named Ivy League Player of the Week, Harvard swept Penn and Princeton to pull into a four-way tie for first place. The Crimson won a nail-biter over the Quakers 63-62 at Lavietes Pavilion as the five-foot-eight-inch Tay grabbed nine rebounds a with 21 points. Then Harvard cruised past Princeton led by 15 points and 7 assists from Tay. Other than a loss at home to Dartmouth, the Crimson have not lost at home since December 5.

Speaking of the Big Green, it had a big weekend of its own as its sweep of Penn and Princeton launched it into a four-way deadlock atop the Ancient Eight. Led by Rookie of the Week forward Brittney Smith, who had 13 points and 12 rebounds, Dartmouth cruised by Princeton. Then, like Harvard, it struggled a bit more with Penn but, buoyed by Smith’s 17 points and 11 rebounds and an 18-0 second half run, Dartmouth came away victorious.

Cornell feasted on Yale and Brown at home, defeating the Bears by 33 and overcoming sophomore forward Haywood Wright’s 16 points to down the Bulldogs by eight.
The Bulldogs, coming off a sweep of Brown, rallied in the second half to down the Lions before falling to the Big Red.

Statistical Tidbits

The two indicators of success for the quartet of 3-1 teams are scoring and rebounding. Though it’s simple enough, the three highest-scoring teams and the three best-rebounding teams are all 3-1.

Cornell and Harvard lead the Ivy League at 65.1 points per game while Yale is the only other team to top 60 at 62.4. The four first-place teams are averaging 61 points per game. Meanwhile, the four other teams—Columbia, Brown, Penn, and Princeton—average fewer than 53.

When it comes to rebounding, Harvard is king as it out-rebounds opponents by 2.4 a game. Cornell and Dartmouth also sport positive rebounding margins with Yale being the only first-place team in the red. Nonetheless, the league’s two worst rebounding teams, Brown and Princeton, are a combined 1-6 in league play.

A final statistic of note is the attendance record. Brown and Columbia, 0-4 and 2-2 respectively, fail to draw 300 fans to home games. The Bears currently have attracted a total of 583 in six home games for an average of 97 fans per game. Meanwhile, Dartmouth, Harvard and Penn all draw over 600 with the Big Green topping the list at 738. Four of the top five teams in attendance all sit in first place.

Struggles in Providence

In 2002-2003, the Brown women’s basketball team began a string of three consecutive winning seasons in league play. In 2004-2005, the last of those three years, the Bears won a share of the Ivy crown. Since then, things have gone from bad to worse.
Last season’s team won just three games in league play and was outscored by nearly 12 points per game.

This year, with ten tough league games remaining, Brown has won just one game all season—a 65-61 victory over Howard. The season certainly did not start well as the Bears lost by more than 30 points in each of their four games and despite a few close calls have fallen 10 straight times since the Howard victory. In league play the Bears nearly pulled out a win in their last game against Columbia but previously were almost doubled up by Cornell 70-37.

Despite being called the conference’s most athletic team by Columbia coach Paul Nixon, the Bears struggle to score as they average just 44.7 points per game. With no one in the lineup averaging seven points a game, they go 12 deep.

Things aren’t likely to get better for Brown, a team that has lost by fewer than 10 just twice on the road, as this weekend it travels to perennial powers Harvard and Dartmouth.