Cornell senior stars take unusual paths to the Big Dance

To anyone who watched Cornell’s dismantling of five seed Temple and four seed Wisconsin, the versatility of the Big Red’s offense was immediately obvious.

Between its three senior stars, point guard Louis Dale, swingman Ryan Wittman, and center Jeff Foote, Cornell has given an answer for just about any defense its opponents have thrown at them.

The Big Red’s 78-65 thrashing of the Owls in the first round saw Jeff Foote, towering at 7 feet, using his height to the team’s advantage. Afraid of letting the leading 3-point shooting team in the country get open on the perimeter, Temple opted not to double down on the first-team all-Ivy center. Left to work one-on-one in the lane, Foote scored 16 points and carried the Big Red as its long range shooting went cold in the first half.

When Temple started to put the clamps on Foote inside in the second half, the dynamic skill set of fellow first-teamers Dale and Wittman, the Ivy League Player of the Year and the team’s leading scorer, came to the forefront. The lightning-quick Dale finished with a game-high 21 points, and, as Temple head coach Fran Dunphy said in a postgame press conference, “Wittman just went crazy with those threes. We’re trying to get back in the game and he’s not allowing it.”

The second round game was more of the same for the Big Red’s opponent, as Wittman got hot early drilling a slew of jumpers en route to a dominating 24-point display. Dale again showed why he was Ivy League Player of the Year himself two seasons ago, consistently slicing into the lane and leading all scorers with 26 points. Foote gave Cornell some muscle inside, using his length to pull down crucial offensive rebounds and taking advantage of second-half mismatches to add 12 points.

The three complement each other extremely well on offense, and their chemistry is evident to anyone who sees them. Cornell’s senior class, enjoying its third straight Tournament appearance after winning the Ancient Eight in each of the last three years, has put its stamp on the program from the very outset—Wittman was the Ivy League rookie of the year. The result has been a cohesive unit that always seems composed despite playing at such a high pace.

As has been well-documented, 13 Big Red players—along with the team manager—live in the same off-campus house, known as the “Dog Pound,” and it shows. Both Temple and Wisconsin, teams known for their ability to shut down the opposition, seemed bewildered by Cornell’s offensive movement and the vast array of ways in which the Big Red can score. Wisconsin came into the game as one of the top five defensive squads in the country, conceding a paltry 56 points per game.

After Cornell hung a season-high 87 points on him and his teammates, a stunned Badger, Keaton Nankivil, told the AP that, “The momentum and confidence they played with, we kind of ran into a buzz saw.”

Wittman, Dale, and Foote can no doubt be blamed in large part for Nankivil and his teammates’ sense of bewilderment after the contest. The members of the trio cannot be considered usual Sweet 16 participants, and each took a different path towards Thursday’s program-defining tilt against one of college basketball’s most famous blue bloods, Kentucky.

Wittman may have taken the most typical route to Ithaca, although even he fell victim to the snubbing each of Cornell’s stars had to endure. The son of Randy Wittman (former head coach in the NBA for the Minnesota Timberwolves and current assistant for the Washington Wizards) Ryan had trouble drawing the attention of his state school, the University of Minnesota. Without the chance to be a Gopher, the lightly recruited Wittman committed to coach Steve Donahue’s program, one of the few coaches to show serious interest. This versatile scorer has since proved any doubters wrong—he has etched his name all over the school’s record books, becoming the first Big Red player to ever eclipse the 2,000-point mark.

Foote’s story is a little less typical. As a 6-foot-8 inch senior at Spencer Van-Etten high school, Foote wasn’t recruited by any Division I schools and instead walked on to the team at St. Bonaventure. As he was trudging through a disappointing freshman year as a redshirt, Cornell’s coaching staff ran into Foote’s mother, Wanda, in January 2006 when Big Red guard Khaliq Gant injured his spine in practice and had to be rushed to Arnot Ogden hospital, where she was a nurse. During Gant’s treatment, Wanda and the coaching staff developed a relationship, prompting her to suggest a different upstate New York institution to her son.

Once on campus, Foote morphed into a 7-foot presence in the lane with the ability to rebound, score, find open shooters, and set towering picks. His play has steadily improved as his role on the team has expanded, and this year Foote emerged as an Ivy League player of the year candidate after earning second-team all-Ivy honors in his junior season.

Aside from Wittman, one of the main beneficiaries of the attention Foote draws down low is Dale. The Big Red’s point guard will be on national television on Thursday when he faces his counterpart on Kentucky, consensus number-one NBA draft pick John Wall, but four years ago such a matchup—especially on such a huge stage—was unthinkable. The Birmingham, Alabama native had to call coach Donahue and ask permission to send the coach his highlight tape. That was nearly the spring of Dale’s senior year, notoriously late for a college basketball recruit to be unclaimed.
As Donahue told the New York Times earlier this week, it didn’t take the Big Red’s coaching staff long to determine they had a talented player on their hands.

“It’s mind-boggling that this is February and a kid with 1,300 SATs and can play like him is sitting on the open market,” Donahue recalled thinking. “That can’t be true.”

The same could be said for Cornell’s historic run through the NCAA tournament, but based on the Big Red’s thorough domination of their first two opponents, many experts are raising an eyebrow even as they face off against Kentucky’s lineup of future NBA lottery picks. And who knows, with the way these three seniors have played together, the trio and their Ivy League teammates may still be dancing when it’s all said and done Thursday night.