Mike-Smith

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.

The Columbia men’s basketball team experienced another tough weekend of Ivy League play, falling to both Penn and Princeton. bringing the Lions’ to their fifth consecutive loss of the season.

The Columbia men’s basketball team (6-14) continued to struggle on the road as the team dropped games against both Yale (16-4) and Brown (9-8). While the result was the same in both contests, the Lions put out very different performances in each matchup.

In Saturday’s 62-50 loss to the Cornell Big Red, the Lions fell prey to one of the defining issues of the season––their inability to win on the road.

While most Columbia students packed their bags and headed home for a chance to relax after a stressful finals period, for the athletes whose sports compete during some of the coldest months of the year, winter break does not offer that same respite. Men’s basketball is one of the teams kept busy over the break.

Men’s basketball fell to the Bryant University Bulldogs (6-4) in heartbreaking fashion on Friday. The Lions squandered an opportunity to win the game in the closing seconds by allowing a turnover, leading to a breakaway dunk by Bryant’s Mikail Simmons to put the Bulldogs up 67-65.

After a four-game road trip during which the Columbia men’s basketball team finished 1-3 and was defeated by an average of 20.33 points in each loss, the Lions picked up a much-needed 68-64 win over the Lehigh University Mountain Hawks at Levien Gymnasium on Saturday, Nov. 30.

With its season coming to a close, Football has one final chance to try to find a silver lining in a season that has not gone as planned. If this Saturday’s bout against the Cornell Big Red is anything like last year’s, the Lions could once again enter the off-season feeling optimistic for what’s ahead.

Henry Williams, a sophomore at Columbia College, is fresh out of the shower, standing in his pajamas with a towel draped over his shoulders, as he welcomes me into the basement lounge of River Hall. There is a lot to talk about, and he does not waste time. He speaks quickly and eloquently—it’s clear that he has told this story many times before. As Williams laments the uninspiring centrism that he believes has plagued leftist politics since the end of the ’60s, a student plays violin across the room. The melancholic crooning is like a funeral march for politics as we know it.

“It’s good to be home.” This was head coach Jim Engles’ main takeaway from the Lions’ home opener for the 2019-2020 season.