While Columbia’s sports teams may be known more for losing than anything else, the opposite is true of the archery program under head coach Derek Davis, who took the helm in 2004.

After the arrival of head coach Al Bagnoli in 2015 and the subsequent success of the program, the Columbia football team began its 2017 season amid supporters’excitement and high expectations. With Bagnoli’s first recruiting class entering its sophomore year, fans anticipated that these young players were ready to make their first contributions to a program that had long known more failure than success. The plan for the season was to add nine sophomores to the starting lineup, putting the kind of pressure on them that college football players do not usually face until they are juniors or seniors.

Since the inception of major league and collegiate athletics, there has been a large following of superfans—even for teams that struggle to perform.

Over the past decade, the Columbia men’s basketball program has featured two head coaches, a number of high-impact players that helped redefine what individual success can look like at Levien Gymnasium, and a few high-intensity moments that will be talked about for decades. And yet, despite these undoubtedly positive developments, the defining takeaway from this decade is that the team has been unable to break out of the pattern of mediocrity that has long been its reputation.

Columbia men’s basketball failed to secure its second Ivy League win this weekend. The losses to Princeton on Friday and Penn on Saturday marked the team’s 12th and 13th consecutive losses, cementing the Lions’ spot at the bottom of the Ancient Eight.

In what is now turning out to be the worst season of head coach Jim Engles’ four-year tenure, men’s basketball lost two more games to Ivy League opponents this weekend. The Light Blue’s latest losses mark its drop to 6-21 on the season, a disastrous 1-11 record in Ivy League play, and an 11-game losing streak that extends to its second conference game this season.

There is no gradual story of the football team’s growth over the past decade program’s evolution. This is because the decade was punctuated by one event that could alter the course of the program for decades to come: the hiring of head coach Al Bagnoli in 2015. Prior to Bagnoli’s arrival, the Lions suffered defeat after defeat under a series of coaches. They went 8-42 total for all games played under the consecutive tenures of head coaches Norries Wilson, who was let go in 2011 following a 1-9 record, and Pete Mangurian, who led the Lions to two consecutive winless seasons in 2013 to 2014.

While the highlight from this weekend’s men’s basketball games may have been the renaming of the Levien Gymnasium’s basketball court in honor of Jonathan Schiller, CC ’69, Law ’73, it is becoming readily apparent that the Lions may be the ones in need of a makeover, as the team dropped both its games for the fourth week in a row.

The Columbia men’s basketball team’s rough start to the Ivy League season continued this weekend as the Lions lost two back-to-back games, squandering late leads in both games and raising questions about this team’s ability to execute down the stretch.