Penn's Schiffner Breaks Out Against M. Hoops

PHILADELPHIA—Penn guard Jeff Schiffner picked a heck of a time for Harvard to break out of his season-long slump.

The senior—who last season led the NCAA in three-point accuracy by hitting at a 49.3-percent clip—had been criticized all season for a drop-off in production.

Entering Friday night’s game against the Crimson, his three-point percentage had declined to a more pedestrian 35.6 percent and his free-throw percentage had dropped from a team-leading 88.2 percent last year, when he was a unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection, to 73.9 percent this season.

That criticism had only intensified with the Quakers’ recent three-game losing streak, a stretch over which Penn shot barely 40 percent from the field.

The last two of those contests were the start of Penn’s Ivy campaign, leaving the Quakers with their first 0-2 conference mark since the 1981-1982 season.

In Penn’s Ivy opener at Yale on Jan. 30, Schiffner shot just 2-for-5 while missing his only three and failing to get to the free-throw line as the Bulldogs snapped Penn’s 23-game conference winning streak with a 54-52 win.

But Friday night went a long way toward making all that a distant memory.

Schiffner exploded for a season-high 24 points in just 24 minutes, hitting a career-high eight field goals (on 12 attempts), shooting 6-for-8 from behind the arc and making both of his free throws.

“He’s taken a lot of heat for not having a good year,” Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. “So I think Schiff really took it on tonight to generate some energy.”

Schiffner’s points came in bunches, too.

There were 10 in a 3:09 stretch early in the first half as the Quakers began to pull away, extending a one-point lead to seven. The Crimson never got any closer.

Then eight more in 1:59 at the end of the first half, capping a 15-0 Penn run to end the half.

And finally, two threes 5:25 and 7:12 after halftime at the start of a 13-0 Quaker spurt that led to Penn’s biggest advantage, a 45-point margin at 83-38.

By the end, Schiffner had the Palestra faithful chanting for his return, if only because they considered him their best chance to get the free cheesesteak a local eatery was offering if the Quakers topped 100 points.

But the 3,886 fans in attendance for Penn’s Ivy home opener didn’t have just Schiffner to thank for their complimentary dinner.

The Quakers’ other starters combined to shoot 17-for-21, led by center Adam Chubb’s perfect 7-for-7 night and Mark Zoller’s 5-for-6 outing.

In fact, take away Eric Osmundson’s 0-for-5 performance and Eric Heil’s miss on his only shot, a three, and Penn’s worst shooting performance was starter Charlie Copp’s 1-for-2—and both of those came on threes.

After Copp, it was Ibby Jaaber’s 5-for-9, and he was 2-for-2 from three.

Then you get to Tim Begley’s 4-for-6 and Schiffner.

In all, the Quakers shot 66.1 percent (37-for-56) from the floor overall and 66.7 percent (14-for-21) from behind the three-point line, both season highs. And that was after they “cooled down” with a 57.7-percent performance (15-for-26) in the second half (7-for-11, 63.6 percent from three) after shooting a scorching 22-for-30 (73.3 percent) in the first half, 7-for-10 (70.0 percent) from beyond the arc.

“Our offense ran pretty smoothly,” Schiffner said. “I felt good shooting it. I think everybody else felt pretty good shooting it, but we were getting good shots and some nights, not all of them are going to fall. Tonight, a lot of them fell.”

“They just couldn’t miss,” junior shooting guard Kevin Rogus said. “It was absolutely ridiculous.”

Penn had separate runs of nine, 11, 13 and 18 consecutive points and finished with 42 points on 21 shots from three-point land as it moved the ball quickly, keeping the Harvard players scrambling to chase it.

“We couldn’t slow the ball down from going inside-outside-extra,” Sullivan said, referring to the Quakers’ ability to move the ball into the low post and back out to the perimeter and then make the extra pass. “So many of those threes just came with extra passing, with ball movement and we just didn’t do a good job catching up to the ball movement.”

“For some reason, every time we were on defense, we were just running around crazy, trying to find the open man,” Rogus said. “They’d always find him. He’d always hit it.”

Coaches and players, of course, will tell you they never look ahead and instead take one game at a time.

But it would be difficult to blame Schiffner and his teammates if they are licking their chops thinking about the rematch at Lavietes Pavilion on March 6.

After all, the last time the teams met before Friday night—Feb. 21, 2003 at Lavietes Pavilion—Schiffner shot 7-for-10 from three-point range as Penn tied a school record by hitting 16 threes in an 82-66 win.

—Staff writer Alan G. Ginsberg can be reached at aginsber@fas.harvard.edu.