SEASON RECAP: NCAA Tourney Drought Prolonged by Losing Streak

The 2005-06 season started with realistic hopes for Harvard’s first league title and ended with the unyielding reality of the Ivy hoops hierarchy.

With the league’s top two returning scorers and rebounders in captain Matt Stehle and junior center Brian Cusworth—Harvard’s twin frontcourt anchors—the Crimson was picked to finish second behind Penn in the league’s preseason poll. That ranking only fueled the high expectations, as Harvard was thought to be facing perhaps its best opportunity to unseat powerhouses Penn and Princeton and claim the school’s first Ivy title and first trip to the NCAA tournament since 1946.

Those dreams, however, faded into bitter memory with an eight-game league losing streak late in the season that transformed Harvard from title challengers into a team struggling to avoid the Ivy basement. After a pair of emotionally jarring last-minute defeats, Harvard fell into a tailspin, losing its shot at history along with the chance for its first winning record in four years. The Crimson finished the season at 13-14 overall and sixth in the Ivy League with a 5-9 mark, seven games behind champion Penn.

“What [the team] experienced for the first time was the feeling that people were really trying to beat us this year,” said coach Frank Sullivan prior to the season’s last weekend. “We generally saw some teams genuinely get excited about beating us. Within the context of our league, we all of a sudden became a quality win, and we took a good shot from a lot of teams.”

The Crimson got off to a strong start in non-conference play, beginning the year with an impressive eight-point victory over defending America East champion Vermont and five straight victories overall. Harvard entered the league season at 8-5, tying the school mark for most non-conference wins in Sullivan’s tenure, and easily handled travel partner Dartmouth in two straight games heading into exam period.

After a draining loss in the abusive atmosphere of Yale’s John J. Lee Ampitheater, Harvard bounced back to blow out Brown on the road and dispatch Columbia in New York. The Crimson was one win over Cornell away from taking four of five games on its toughest road trip of the year and returning to Lavietes Pavilion in great shape for a critical series against Princeton and Penn.

That scenario came painfully close to being made reality, for despite having both Stehle and Cusworth foul out in the game’s final minutes, the Crimson fought to a three point lead with under a minute left. But Cornell captain Lenny Collins kept his team alive by scoring eight straight Big Red points down the stretch, including an off-balance three pointer that tied the score at 77. Harvard couldn’t answer, and a put-back from forward Jason Hartford with a second left gave Cornell the 79-77 victory.

The Crimson appeared to have sloughed off the effects of the bad trip to Ithaca the next weekend, as Harvard led nemesis Princeton by six with a minute to play in front of a sell-out Lavietes crowd. As they always seem to do against Harvard, the Tigers came back in remarkable fashion, with Noah Savage nailing a baseline jumper with under a second left to give Princeton a 60-59 win.

“Back-to-back losses, losing in the last second like we did, it was kind of a rough way to go into the Penn game, which is what everyone was looking forward to,” said junior shooting guard Jim Goffredo. “It took the wind out of us, [and] it was tough for us to bounce back.”

Harvard lost by 13 the next night against Penn, then dropped the next two to Brown and Yale, effectively ending any chance to climb back into the league title picture. Three more defeats followed, capped by a blowout at the hands of Cornell, before Harvard beat Columbia to snap the streak and salvage Senior Night.

The Crimson’s late-season collapse mirrored the 2002-03 season’s disappointing finish, when Harvard—bearing similarly high expectations for a senior-laden squad—compiled an identical 8-5 mark in non-conference play.

That team dropped eight of its final 10 league games, just as the Crimson did this year, to fall out of the race.

“It’s eerily similar, for sure,” said Sullivan after the second loss to Cornell. “The interesting dynamic is that the current upperclassmen observed that [as freshmen]. It’s something they knew about and watched. In this segment of games, though, there have been a lot more heartbreaking losses than there were during that segment.”

At the end of each year, it was Penn with the title, and Harvard wondering when its day might come.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.