I know football season is just around the corner, but forgive this basketball interlude.

College Basketball 24/7 is a blog run by 15-year and self-proclaimed "fanatic about college basketball" Jakob Kagel. For a teenager, it's not bad, but one of his more recent posts is a little puzzling.

On Tuesday he wrote a post entitled "Why Cornell Will be the best team in the Ivy League... Ever." His argument is basically the following: Cornell returns a lot of talent, despite Adam Gore's injury (yet he only mentions Ryan Wittman). The schedule has "very winnable early season games against brand name schools," such as Indiana, Minnesota and St. John's. Also, without an Ivy Conference tournament, they could clinch conference play early. Finally, he then says that if Cornell goes 14-0 in the League, they'll have won 29 straight.

First off, I'm still not completely convinced Indiana will be an easy win, especially considering the game's in Bloomington, not Ithaca. Going into Assembly Hall and getting a win is easier said than done, regardless of Indiana's recent sub-par results (sub-par by its standards).

I'll grant him the fact that the conference tournament clearly helps Cornell since they have a greater shot at making the NCAA Tournament without having to face single elimination.  But going 29-0 in a two-plus year span doesn't make them the best ever, considering Penn won 48-straight Ivy League games from 1992-1996.

After this basic argument, he then says if Cornell does the above and goes 14-0 (which personally I don't think will happen even if they are the league favorites), they'll invite comparisons to Bucknell who "has been the most recent low major to escape from the confines of playing in a league that had not won an NCAA tournament game in 40 plus years."

And here's where his argument completely derails.  First off, the Patriot League was founded in 1986 as the Colonial League. And that first year Navy won three NCAA tournament games. Similarly, the Ivy League has had many tournament wins in the last 40 years plus year, as they have averaged just about one every two years since March 1967 (20 in 42 tournaments).

So maybe comparisons to Bucknell and the Patriot League aren't apt.  Well what about the statement further down that "no team out of the Ivy has won an NCAA tournament game in 20-plus years."  That's simply not true. There've been three since 1988, most notably Princeton's upset over defending champion UCLA in 1996.

After this error, Kagel then shifts back to Cornell, saying, "This year's Cornell team will be the best that the league has had to offer for the last 15 years, at least." Wait, I thought they were supposed to be the best team ever?  Oh no, actually it's just that "the expectations for an Ivy League team have never been this high ... ever."  Oh so, it's their expectations that are an Ivy record?

The end of the post kind of redeems him.  I think it could be argued that this team might be one of the best Ivy ones over the last 15 years.  Although I'm sure the Penn teams of Michael Jordan, Matt Maloney, Ugonna Onyekwe or even Ibrahim Jaaber might have something to say about that, not to mention some of the good Princeton teams in the 1990's. And I'll certainly agree that the expectations are quite high on this Cornell group.  But then again, the Big Red's two best players, Wittman and Louis Dale, are just juniors, so it's not like they have the extra pressure of only one more year to win an NCAA tournament game.

What do you think about Cornell's chances of greatest Ivy team of the last 15 years, or even of all time?

Tags: cornell, Ivy League, Men's Basketball

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 3:17 am and is filed under Ivy League, Men's Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.