Impossible Task Faces Ivies at NCAA Tourney

Odds are good that, amongst the flurry of first-round NCAA tournament games last weekend, you missed Stanford’s dismantling of Ivy League champion and designated tournament representative Cornell, with the Big Red losing by 24 points in a game that was never particularly close. It’s not surprising, I suppose, how much a 14-0 record in the Ivy League means to a team like Stanford.

It’s also not surprising that, once again, an Ivy League team easily routs its conference opponents only to get shellacked when it tries to dance with the big boys. This isn’t a slight on either Cornell or any of the other Ivy teams that have made the tournament—obviously, going into these games as a low seed and going up against one of nation’s top 10 teams usually isn’t going to end well. The last Ivy win in the tournament came in 1998, when Princeton went into the first round as a fifth seed, easily defeated UNLV, and then lost to a Michigan State team that would win the national championship in 1999. (Interesting side note: the leading scorer of that 1998 tournament? Michael Doleac. College basketball really is an entirely different world from the NBA.) Princeton also has the lone highlight of the Ivy League’s recent tournament history, upsetting defending national champion UCLA in 1996 by a stultifying 43-41 score.

Recent years have seen feisty efforts from Penn and Princeton alike. Penn put a scare into a lot of gamblers by hanging tough with Texas in 2006 and again with Texas A&M in 2007, while Princeton, as a 16-seed in 1989, came within an Alonzo Mourning block from knocking off top-ranked Georgetown. Both the Tigers and Quakers also boast first-round wins in the last decade or so, with Princeton’s aforementioned defeats of UCLA and UNLV, and Penn’s upset of Nebraska in 1994.

Nonetheless, you have to go pretty far back to find the last Ivy team that got past the second round. The last Ivy team to make the Final Four was Penn in 1979—that team beat number one-seed UNC in the second round, Syracuse in the Sweet Sixteen, and St. John’s in the Elite Eight before Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team obliterated the Quakers by 34 points en route to the national championship over Larry Bird’s Indiana State squad. Penn ended up with a fourth-place finish in the tournament, losing the consolation game to DePaul in overtime. Outside of Penn, only two other Ivy teams have made the Final Four. The first is, obviously enough, Princeton, which, behind future Knicks star Bill Bradley, defeated Penn State, North Carolina State, and Providence before falling to Michigan in 1965. The Tigers came out of that tournament with a third-place finish thanks to Bradley’s Final Four record of 58 points in a 118-82 win over Wichita State. The other team, incredibly enough, is Dartmouth.

That’s right, the Big Green—perhaps one of the longest running jokes in Ivy League basketball, if such a thing is even possible—made it all the way to the national championship game, the only Ivy team to ever do so. Granted, that appearance came in 1944, back when Dartmouth was still known as the Indians and when the tournament consisted of only eight schools and nine games. The participating teams didn’t exactly comprise a current-day Murderers’ Row—Catholic University, Pepperdine, and Temple were three of the eight teams taking part. The Big Green started the tourney with a 63-38 blowout of Catholic, followed by a close win over Ohio State, leading to a title showdown with Utah at (where else) Madison Square Garden.

Dartmouth came in as the favorite, led by Audley Brindley, who scored a shade under 17 points per game in Ivy play and ended up scoring 17.5 points per game in the tournament.

The game itself was full of dramatics. Down two with three seconds left, Dartmouth’s Dick McGuire made an off-balance shot, tying the game at 36 and sending the contest into overtime. Amazingly enough, the overtime period went down to the wire as well, only this time, it was the Utes who stunned the then-Indians, making a basket with—once again—three seconds left to steal a 42-40 win. It would be Dartmouth’s last-ever championship appearance, and the Big Green’s last tournament game until 1956. Dartmouth hasn’t been back to the tournament since 1959.

All in all, the Ivy League has received 65 bids to the tournament, with each team having gone at least once. No team in the Ancient Eight has ever won the championship, and no team since that 1979 Quakers team has really even come close.

If recent history is any indicator of future success, then that championship drought might go on indefinitely. Nonetheless, most Ivy coaches will probably tell you that just getting to the tournament, no matter the first-round result, is the mark of a successful season. I’ll guarantee you that Cornell head coach Steve Donahue wasn’t too happy about Stanford treating the Big Red like the Washington Generals for 40 minutes last Friday. But I’ll also guarantee you that, at the end of the day, Donahue and his players wouldn’t trade their Ivy championship and NCAA tournament opportunity for just about anything else.