Split Weekend Leaves Questions Unanswered For M. Hoopsters

ITHACA, N.Y.--Someone please clue me in here.

Did the most recent round of core reform exempt varsity athletes from the History A and B cores?

Have the elite institutions of the Ivy League recently abandoned their commitment to the past?

Whatever the reason, everyone surrounding the men's basketball team's 70-56 drubbing of Cornell on Saturday seemed stricken with a severe case of short-term memory.

It began with Ithaca's WVBR-FM announcer Barry Leonard, who was surprisingly quick to excuse his team's poor showing.

"In terms of talent and experience, Harvard, Penn and Princeton are the class of the league--the other five teams are really just competing for the middle of the pack," Leonard said.

You would have had a very tough time convincing Dartmouth that it just could not compete when it had Harvard down 28 points en route to a 78-59 Crimson embarrassment last month in Cambridge.

Numbers rarely lie. Harvard and Cornell have three common opponents this season. Cornell beat Lehigh and Colgate handily last month and dropped a 59-52 contest with then-undefeated Marist (10-3) in which it was within two points with less than two minutes to play.

Harvard, on the other hand, lost close games to Lehigh and Colgate and never seriously threatened Marist.

That makes Harvard the team to beat?

In all fairness, the uncertainty surrounding sophomore Dan Clemente's fitness to play this season made Harvard's early preconference games little more than scrimmages to test the waters.

However, 15 games into a 26-game schedule, it becomes time to put up or shut up.

Coach Frank Sullivan, however, spoke of "getting a good bead on what we're trying to accomplish."

Meanwhile, when Clemente talked about the difficulties of the Cornell-Columia road trip after the Cornell win, the clear implication was that Harvard had the superior team that needed to buckle down and avoid letting the travel and hostile environment get to it.

Harvard, the team would have you believe, had its season in gear on the strength of three mediocre wins over Northeastern, Hartford and Santa Clara, and a single Ivy win over Cornell (with downplayed losses to St. Joseph's and Navy sandwiched in between).

Then Harvard went out the next night against an inferior Columbia team and laid an egg.

The short-sightedness is amplified by Harvard's disjunct schedule. The exam break that began yesterday creates, in effect, two mini-seasons, in which a single big win seems to make a season, and consecutive losses are a disaster.

Harvard beat Boston College in the season opener largely without Clemente on the floor. As Clemente--the team's only complete scoring threat entering the season--has worked into the lineup and started to produce offensively, Harvard has not significantly improved with the swingman's re-incorporation.

Harvard's bulk on the interior--seniors Paul Fisher and Bill Ewing and sophomore Tim Coleman--have been so unproductive at both ends (15 rebounds and 17 points between them for two games over the weekend) that Sullivan recently scrapped a two-guard set and returned Clemente to the four spot to make room for a third guard.

If Harvard really is "the class of the Ivy League," they have done precious little this season to demonstrate the point.

In a schedule scattered with a couple good wins, several bad losses, and otherwise uninspiring results, Harvard is a senior team battling for its Ivy-League life along with the rest of the league pack.

The season certainly is not lost--by the same token, two early losses in conference do not doom a year--but after Dartmouth this Wednesday the team will have three weeks without basketball to take stock of the first half of the season and determine if it likes the way it has progressed.

This is a deep, talented team. I just want to be able to look forward to watching them play in February.