Future of Ivy Basketball Largely Rests with New Head Coaches

It may not be unreasonable a generation from now to say that the direction of Ivy League basketball was determined by two men and two offseasons.

The conference has experienced extreme growth over the last decade, highlighted by the emergence of Steve Donahue’s Cornell teams and Tommy Amaker’s Harvard ones as legitimate mid-major threats. The level of play and the caliber of players in the Ivy League is the highest it has been in a long time. However, as the Crimson prepares to make its annual weekend roadtrip to New York to take on Cornell and Columbia, the conference stands at a crossroads.

Three Ivy League basketball programs have new coaches roaming the sidelines this season and half of the conference’s teams have a different head man than they did two seasons ago. Columbia, which won the CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament last March, saw Kevin Smith leave to take the head job at the University of San Francisco. Cornell did not renew the contract of Bill Courtney after he posted a 10-18 record last season. Paul Cormier was axed from his second stint at Dartmouth. Donahue is now entering his second season at the helm for Penn.

The three first-year head coaches—Jim Engles at Columbia, Brian Earl at Cornell, and David McLaughlin at Dartmouth—represent the three newest members of what is becoming a conference coaching carousel.

The coaching changes highlight a separation that is emerging in the Ivy League. On the one hand, the conference is expanding the Ivy League Digital Network, sending its most marketable team to play a game in China, adding a postseason tournament to increase revenue and attract attention, and bringing in some of the most talented high school recruits the league has ever seen.

On the other, the eight teams’ facilities pale in comparison to many of their local rivals, let alone national powerhouses, against whom they are competing for recruits. While the difficulty of getting top-level athletes to Ivy League campuses has been overstated, Brown, the Killer C’s, Dartmouth, and Penn have struggled to attract players of the same caliber as the conference’s big three.

To put it more simply, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have solidified themselves as the class of Ivy League basketball over the last five seasons while Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth have emerged as perennial bottom feeders. The direction of the league going forward will largely have to do with the jobs that Donahue and Engles do at their respective schools.

Donahue is what you would call a splash hire, the biggest name an Ivy League program has poached since Amaker in 2007. Donahue is a perfect fit for the Quakers, a Delaware Valley native who served as an assistant under former Penn and current Temple coach Fran Dunphy. Donahue has a chance to crash the Harvard-Princeton-Yale party largely due to the Quakers’ tradition of winning (38 Ivy League championships) and his personal track record of success in the conference (three Ivy League championships and a Sweet Sixteen appearance at Cornell). Donahue went 5-9 in conference play in his first season and has 11 underclassmen on his roster.

While Penn appears to be on the right track under Donahue, the jury is still out on the job Engles will do with a Columbia program that has been trending upward in recent years but has had just five winning seasons since 1982. Smith proved that it is possible to win at Columbia (25 games and a CIT crown last season), but his departure for a program that last made the tournament in 1998 should be a red flag for Columbia and the conference as a whole.

If you want a coach who can win at a school with no tradition of winning, Engles is your guy. The Staten Island native took over an NJIT team that was finishing its transition to Division I in 2008. The Highlanders went 1-30 in 2008-2009. Four seasons later, NJIT was celebrating a Great West Conference championship. Engles won 20 or more games in each of the last two seasons.

Columbia is hoping that Engles is the right man to bring the Lions their first NCAA Tournament bid since 1968. He knows how to recruit from New York and will continue to draw from the nation’s largest metropolitan area. It doesn’t hurt that Columbia has been one of the city’s more successful programs in recent years, having won more games than Fordham, Seton Hall, and St. John’s over the past three seasons. Engles has five players committed for next year, with two coming from the New York metro, and his first recruiting class is currently ranked second in the Ivy by 247Sports.

Last season was a dream season of sorts for the top half of the Ivy League. Princeton and Yale were clearly the best teams in the conference and both had enough talent to make some noise come tournament time. Yale beat Baylor and gave Duke a game in the Round of 32. Princeton won 22 games and was a six seed in the NIT while Columbia brought home the CIT and Harvard beat Auburn, BYU, and Princeton during the regular season. The quartet went a combined 29-3 against the bottom half of the league.

As Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (the league’s preseason top three) are beginning to assert their dominance this season, the future of these programs will largely come down to Columbia and Penn. Amaker and Yale coach James Jones have been tied to head coaching vacancies at major programs across the country while Mitch Henderson of Princeton is only 41 years old and was a finalist for the Northwestern job back in 2013.

How long these coaches will stay at their respective schools could largely come down to the level of play throughout the rest of the league. Earl and McLaughlin could follow in the footsteps of Amaker, Henderson, and Jones and bring success to Ithaca and Hanover, while Mike Martin’s youth and allegiance to Brown make him as likely as anyone to turn around the Bears.

However, the fate of the Ivy League will ultimately come down to the Lions and Quakers. If the Ivy League can have five legitimate teams that each have nonconference wins against big-time opponents, the idea of a two-bid Ivy may not seem too far fetched. However, the conference has a long way to go. Currently, Princeton is widely seen as the conference’s best team this season despite its signature nonconference win coming against Bucknell.

Is Columbia’s ceiling a third place finish in the conference? Is Donahue capable of making people want to toast to dear old Penn once again? Ten, 15, 20 years from now, will we look at the past decade as the pinnacle of Ivy League basketball or will it have been just the beginning of the Ancient Eight’s emergence as a legitimate mid-major conference? The answer may come down to Jim Engles and Steve Donahue.

Now to the picks:

HARVARD AT CORNELL

The first thought that comes to mind with this matchup is its outcome just a year ago. In that showdown, Harvard played catch-up throughout the second half until a late floater from then-freshman Tommy McCarthy gave the Crimson the win. It would be among the lone bright spots in a lackluster season for Harvard.

Nearly a year later the two teams couldn’t be more unrecognizable. Harvard comes in led by a squad of freshmen that have led the Crimson to nine wins in its past ten games while the Big Red relies on a trio of sophomores in Matt Morgan and Stone Gettings. The second-year duo and senior Robert Hatter combine to average over 43 of Cornell’s season average of 73 points per game.

To make sense of this matchup, one only needs to look at the team’s matchups with Houston. The Cougars handed the Big Red a 30-point loss while Harvard took down Houston on the road in January.

Pick: Harvard

DARTMOUTH AT COLUMBIA

You could make the argument that Dartmouth needs to win at some point.

I, for one, will not. This is a team that lost its first nine games of the season. Sure, it has the reigning Ivy League Rookie of the Year in Evan Boudreaux, but sometimes teamwork really does make the dream work.

Before Big Green fans take up arms, let me say Columbia hasn’t had a particularly stellar season either. They come into Friday having split games against Cornell and more than anything the Lions are a team that only wins games that they’re supposed to win. Prime example: Dartmouth.

Pick: Columbia

BROWN AT YALE

Where to begin with this one. A week ago it would’ve been easy to call a runaway Yale win, but after beating the Bears by a only single point in Providence the Bulldogs don’t look like the favorites they once were.

I do think, however, that geography is important to consider here. New Haven is a town of about 130,000 people located in Connecticut. It’s sort of this gothic concrete thing located in between the much more aesthetically pleasing temperate deciduous forests that dot the Northeast. In some circles, it’s also known as a place you should avoid when traveling between New York and Boston.

Be it what it may—and unbeknownst to many—New Haven is also where Yale is located. From an objective standpoint it would seem a bit weird to attribute any kind of homecourt advantage to a place that couldn’t come up with a better nickname than “The Elm City.” Given the atypical student body, however, playing in New Haven might just be what the Bulldogs need to beat Brown by more than a point.

Pick: Yale

HARVARD AT COLUMBIA

Undisclosed sources say that Columbia’s whole team from last season is gone.

I’ve looked into it and it appears that they still have a roster. So barring some unforeseen event, there will be a game on Saturday.

Truth be told, the Lions did lose some key players in Grant Mullins and Maodo Lo. Despite their departure, Columbia has managed to eke out some wins, but this is clearly not the Lions squad that won 25 games a year ago. In many ways, this matchup is probably the most indicative of how much the league has changed in the past year—with Harvard on the rise, this will be a tough one for a program that handed the Crimson two losses a season ago.

Pick: Harvard

DARTMOUTH AT CORNELL

Dartmouth’s motto is “Vox clamantis in deserto.” This translates into “a voice crying out in the wilderness.”

Pick: Cornell

—Staff writer Troy Boccelli can be reached at troy.boccelli@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Stephen J. Gleason can be reached at stephen.gleason@thecrimson.com.