Get To Know a College Basketball Mid-Major: Ivy League

You know all about the Power 6 conferences in college basketball. You hear about those more than any other, and those groups often dominate the March Madness conversation. There are 31 other conferences out there, however, and our goal is to get you up to speed on the teams, players and fights in the standings to know before the conference tournaments, Selection Sunday and the official start of March Madness. It’s time for you to get to know a mid-major: this time, it’s the Ivy League. The Ivy League is one of the smaller conferences around, as it has just eight members, all with basketball teams of their own on both the men’s and women’s side. The schools are all located in the northeast, split between Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and per the Ivy League itself the conference name was taken from a term first used 21 years before its formation in 1954. The Ivy League was the last Division I conference to introduce a championship tournament; prior to 2017, the regular season champion of the Ivy was also granted the automatic bid to March Madness, and a tiebreaking playoff game was added if necessary. Since then, though, there have been six four-team tournaments at the end of the regular season, with Yale winning four of the men’s tourneys while Princeton has dominated the women’s with five victories. Fun men’s Ivy fact: if the regular season men’s champion is not the same as the team that won the tournament, it receives an automatic spot in the National Invitation Tournament. Fun women’s Ivy fact: Harvard guard Allison Feaster led the league in scoring in her senior season of 1997-1998, brought the No. 16 Crimson past No. 1 Stanford for the first-ever such win in March Madness history — 20 years before UMBC defeated Virginia in the men’s tourney — became the first-ever Ivy player drafted to the WNBA where she would play for 10 years, and  is now the Vice President of Team Operations and Organizational Growth for the Boston Celtics. Also, she goes by Allison Feaster-Strong these days, and is UConn star Sarah Strong’s mother. Ivy League — Men’s College Basketball Leaders: Harvard and Yale are tied atop the conference, both at 5-2. Dartmouth and Princeton are tied for third, at 4-3. You can’t count almost any of these teams out just yet despite the fact just four of them will make the conference tournament, though, because three of the other four — Columbia, Penn and Cornell — are 3-4, putting them not all that far behind the ones vying for the last two spots. However, Yale ranks 63rd in the NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET, and there’s a massive gap between the Bulldogs and anyone else in the conference. Columbia is next, nearly 100 spots behind at 161, then Harvard is 165th. Penn (176th) and Cornell (178th) aren’t far behind, but Dartmouth is 222nd and Princeton 227th — Brown brings up the rear at 292, which tracks with its 1-6 record. It’s not just NET. Yale is 75th in KenPom’s team ratings, owing to the 28th-best offense in the nation. It just happens to, unfortunately for the Bulldogs, be paired with the 214th-“best” defense. (When you adjust for the strength of the schedule Yale has dealt with, that offense gets worse, but this is about the chances of making it out of the conference.) Harvard’s offense doesn’t match up and its defense is better, but only comparatively so. Columbia’s offense is even worse than Harvard’s, and its defense is just as bad as Yale’s. The familiarity of a small conference means it could theoretically be anybody’s for the taking — save for Brown — but everything still favors Yale given its one — not at all insignificant — advantage. Senior forward Nick Townsend is leading the Bulldogs in points (17), rebounds (7.7) and assists (4.2) per game. He is one of four players averaging at least 10.8 points for Yale, and behind that bunch are another two at 9.0 and 8.9 — one of which, junior center Samson Aletan, is second on the team in rebounds at 6.1. The defense might not be there, but this lineup is scoring 122.8 points per 100 possessions, and no one in the conference has the means to easily put a stop to that. Someone else will have to in order to get into March Madness, however: the Ivy League has only had an automatic bid in each of the last three tournaments. Ivy League — Women’s College Basketball Leaders: Princeton is ranked, which is a rarity among non-power conferences. The Tigers are 18-2 overall and No. 23 in the nation, which at least in theory makes them an easy favorite for the Ivy League conference championship and the automatic bid into the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. However, it’s not that simple — the gap that exists on the men’s side does not also exist on the women’s. Princeton, 6-1 in conference play and first in the Ivy standings, is ranked No. 23, but it’s 44th in NET. Columbia is in second at 5-2, and is 59th in NET. Harvard is also 5-2, and 67th. Even the teams after these aren’t trailing by that much, as Penn (125th, 3-4) and Brown (127th, 4-3) are in the range where either could conceivably upset one of the three above. It’s a little tougher to ask that of Dartmouth (289th, 1-6) and Yale (290th, 1-6), however. Cornell is a wildcard, as it’s ranked last in the conference in NET at 305 — one of the 50 or 60 worst teams in Division I women’s basketball — but also 3 of its 8 wins have come in conference play, and the Big Red lost to Princeton by just 11 points to end their January. Princeton has the 36th-best Offensive Rating in the nation, but is 115th in Defensive Rating. Columbia’s defense is better — 78th — but its offense is worse, at 61st. Harvard has the weakest offense of the bunch, at 106th, but the strongest defense, at 45th. It really is not easy to suss out which school will fare better in the tourney, and it’s even more confusing when you realize that Harvard and Princeton have already played each other once, with the Tigers coming away with an 82-79 win in overtime, while Columbia also defeated the Crimson by just 3 points… and defeated Princeton on Jan. 30, 73-67. Another thing that separates the men’s and women’s Ivy League, though? The women have sent three and two teams to the tournament in the past two seasons, meaning at-large bids are a distinct possibility even if the conference championship is lost.