Where Does The Ivy League Really Stand?

Anyone who has looked at the RPI realizes that the Ivy League had fallen from its recent perch, squarely in the teens, first to the absolute bottom of the list before rebounding to the high 20s.

While the league has struggled this season, the binary win-loss nature of the RPI is currently punishing the Ivies far too much for their close losses, something which should even out and lead to the league's rise over the next month.

Pomeroy tells a different story, as the league sits 15th nationally, primarily on the strength of the overly generous preseason rankings, which are still biasing the team ratings in his system.

The ultimate answer likely lies in between the two. Massey's composite rankings, which look at a wide ranging group of ranking systems, have the Ivy League in 21st, and Sagarin's predictive model has the league 25th. If forced to pick a narrow range within which the Ivies would be likely to fall, those boundaries sound as good as any.

The 2012-13 Ivy Basketball Projection Post

It was going to be 2010-11 all over again.

A talented Harvard team, full of potential, against a gritty, veteran Princeton unit with the league's best two-way player (Kareem Maddox, then, and Ian Hummer now) in a showdown for another Ivy title. The Crimson appeared to be the slight favorites in that hypothetical horse race, boasting a much stronger reservoir of young talent to fill out its rotation than the Tigers had accumulated over the past couple years.

Then, this happened.

Harvard lost its best player (Kyle Casey) and its most important player (Brandyn Curry) in one 24-hour news cycle, which when combined with the graduation losses of Keith Wright and Oliver McNally left the Crimson down four starters from last year's NCAA tournament squad. Oh, and throw in rotation guard Corbin Miller, who left the team to fulfill his two-year religious mission obligation. Those five players accounted for 62 percent of last year's total offensive possessions and included three of Harvard's four best defenders by Adjusted Plus-Minus. Most importantly, that list also included the only three Crimson players to see any time at point guard last season (Curry, McNally, Miller).

Noruwa Agho Takes 25 Shots, And Other Things That Happened This Weekend

Hard to argue that the most surprising performances of the weekend came in Ivy showdowns with the Big East, of all conferences.

The league's No. 7 seed, Columbia, waltzed into Gampel and gave the defending champion UConn quite the battle for 40 minutes. Meanwhile Ivy No. 8 seed Dartmouth was within a possession of Rutgers before ultimately falling by six.

The rest of the weekend was a combination of okay and downright scary results. Brown and Harvard took care of their Division III opponents with relative ease. Penn pulled away late to coast to a win in an ugly game against UMBC. Yale used an 18-1 run to open up a commanding lead on Central Connecticut, only to have the Blue Devils close a 14-point deficit to one with under two to play before the Bulldogs closed out a 73-69 victory.

Opening Weekend Preview

It's finally here.

All eight Ivy League basketball teams will open their seasons this weekend with actual games that count in the actual NCAA record books. (Rumor has it that a lot of these teams have already "played" a couple of "games" against other Division I "schools" over the past 10 days or so).

That's the good news. The bad news is that the grand re-opening of college basketball in the Ivy League could be a bit of a letdown.

Harvard and Brown kick things off on Friday night with MIT and Johnson & Wales, respectively, which both hail from outside the Division I ranks. Columbia and Dartmouth have the exact opposite problem, as each take to the road to visit a Big East school - Connecticut and Rutgers, respectively. The Big Green has the best projected winning percentage for any of the underdogs in those four games at a mere four percent.

2011-2012 Season Preview: The Uber-Post

Princeton or Harvard. Harvard or Princeton.

Last year, that was pretty much the only question that mattered. This year, who will win the Ivy title is pretty much the only question that doesn't matter.

Of far greater importance are the debates about Yale as the number one contender, the fall of Princeton, the rise of Penn and the high hopes of Brown, Cornell and Columbia. With most pundits worrying far more about where Harvard will be seeded rather than if the Crimson will win the title, the goal of this year's projections will be to parse out the good Ivy teams from the decent and the decent from the bad.

2011-2012 Season Preview: Pre-Season All-Ivy

The projection of team statistics is far more stable than their component parts, primarily due to the law of compensating errors.

But the awards that many fans love so much are bestowed on an individual level, making more granular prognostications necessary in preparation for the upcoming season.

In this portion of the season preview, we'll take a look at the returning players to watch as well as the top talent from the incoming class. These are not projections of who will make each team per se (obviously if Noruwa Agho scores over 15 points a game, they'll put him on the First Team regardless of whether he needs 25 shots per game to do it), they are merely a representation of the value of each player as seen by the tempo-free community.

Preseason Primer

The release of the final preseason projections on this site is still a few weeks away (though the Ivy League will release its official media poll this Wednesday).

It's expected that Harvard will top the preseason list for the first time in the history of the poll, and not to ruin the surprise, the Crimson will probably be favored pretty heavily in this site's release as well.

That (and maybe that Dartmouth will finish last) is where the consensus stops, however. Different prognostications have had Princeton as the number one contender or as far down as fourth. Yale has been tabbed by many as the likely runner up, but by others out of the upper division entirely. Penn is probably the most egregious offender, as some think the Quakers could steal second, while others have them in a fight to avoid seventh.

The purpose today is not to rank the teams, but rather to provide some starting points for thinking about each Ivy team and the league as a whole, which should help better prepare you, the reader, for establishing your own preseason hierarchy.

The Great Unknowns

Penn is the epicenter of this debate.

Senior point guard Zack Rosen is on pace to become the second most productive Ivy player of the past 10 years. Flanking him are fifth-year senior Tyler Bernardini, a streaky but at times lights out shooter who can add value at both ends of the court, and sophomore Miles Cartwright, an uber-athletic slasher who could vault to All-Ivy status if he could hold onto the ball a little better.

Even if you like the Quakers' returning depth at the guard position behind those three stars, there are two gaping holes at the four and five left by the graduation of Jack Eggleston and Conor Turley. Internal candidates do exist - the ever fragile Mike Howlett and sophomores Fran Dougherty and Cameron Gunter - but the true hope rests on the shoulders of heralded freshmen forwards Greg Louis and Henry Brooks.

How reasonable is that expectation, though? Brooks is the 19th most highly rated recruit of the past 10 years. Louis is 43rd most highly rated over the same span. Both are in the top 10 percent of the over 400 recruits from that timespan. But do the ratings even matter?

Does Defense Matter

The advanced stat movement in basketball has a long way to go to catch baseball.

Various hurdles exist along the path. The popular parlance notes that baseball is an "individual sport masquerading as a team sport," whereas basketball outcomes are much more of a product of five interwoven parts. Then, there's the issue of whether basketball even collects enough data, or at least the right data, from which to draw conclusions.

The latter is especially concerning on the defensive end of the court. Dean Oliver, the godfather of the "Pomeroy" stats, suggested an expanded boxscore, which would include forced field goal misses to allocate defensive stops more appropriately, rather than just giving credit to the player that ultimately rebounded the miss. Without such a change, Oliver's defensive rating disproportionately favored big men, who could rack up huge numbers of rebounds and blocks, while guards saw their ratings primarily dependent on the only other input to the rating - steals.

Critics of Oliver's defensive rating launched a bevy of arguments, including the lack of a "forced miss" statistic and the circular nature of assignments (even if you could single out defensive performance, the best defenders draw the best offensive players, which would cause the best defenders to look more average than they actually are).

Final Ivy Composite Schedule

At long last, here is the full and complete Ivy slate. Tip off is in less than two months. (Games in yellow are placeholders for a tournament format. Actual opponents will depend on results in the tournament games.)

UPDATED: Ivy Composite Schedule (As of 9/15)

We're getting closer to the full release of the Ivy schedules, but for now, here are the announced/expected games and dates, where available. Cornell, Harvard and Yale's schedules are officially released. Each of the other schools has at least half of its non-conference games on this list (Brown and Columbia at around 50%, Dartmouth and Princeton at about 65% and Penn at about 80%).

Games in yellow are either part of a tournament - thus the pairings are mere placeholders depending on game outcomes - or in the case of Penn and Princeton, guesses at game dates based on traditional scheduling.

Excluding the non-Division I games (all of which are denoted DIII, regardless of whether the opponent is DII, NAIA, etc.) and based on last year's Pomeroy finish, Princeton currently has the toughest expected non-conference strength of schedule at .674. Penn is a close second at .644. The Quakers are easily in front when considering DIII contests into the SOS, and one should expect Penn to end up with the toughest SOS even when excluding the DIII games after the remaining dates on each of the Quakers and Tigers schedules are revealed.

Following Penn and Princeton, Cornell has the third toughest schedule with Dartmouth, Harvard and Brown right behind. Expect the Bears and Big Green to see their SOS slip as more games are released, though. Finally, Yale and Columbia bring up the rear as the only two teams with SOS ratings below .500.

(UPDATE: Brown's full schedule has been released and sure enough, the Bears have slipped to the weakest league schedule. Expect Columbia to challenge for that title when its full slate is released.)

(UPDATE 9/9: Columbia released its full schedule and sure enough, it now has the weakest slate by a landslide. Excluding non-D-I games, the league's SOS sits right at .500 now. We have 90 percent of the games on the schedule with just Dartmouth, Penn and Princeton yet to release. The Tigers still lead in the SOS category, but assuming they actually want to play at home during the non-conference slate, their SOS will probably take a tumble as the remaining games should include enticing some cupcakes to play at Jadwin.)

(UPDATE 9/15: Down to just 10 or fewer games to go - depending on whether teams max out their schedules. Dartmouth and Princeton have four left and Penn has two. Those are also the only three with schedules remaining to be released. The Tigers are still hanging onto the top spot in the SOS battle with Penn close behind. Cornell and Harvard remain in third and fourth, then a huge gap before getting to Yale, Dartmouth and Brown and another huge gap to get to last place Columbia.)

Shorting Harvard

The Crimson is a Top 50 team. It's a lock to grab the Ivy League title. It'll be a tournament sleeper.

But locks don't have gaping flaws. This Harvard team might.

Offensively, the Crimson is already one of the best teams the Ivies seen over the past 15 years, posting top six Adjusted Offensive Ratings for both the whole season and during the conference slate. Losing no one, adding a stellar recruiting class and getting a full year of Kyle Casey at 100 percent should at the very least guarantee the same, if not better, production during the 2011-2012 campaign.

The Value of Returning Possessions

The praise has been lavish.

Some have gone so far as to make the 2011-12 edition of the Crimson a pre-season Top 50 team, while almost all have made Harvard the prohibitive favorite in the Ivy League.

What is it, exactly, that separates the Crimson from Princeton, with which it shared last year's Ivy title and the latter of which secured the league's automatic bid?

The simple answer is returnees. In this case, Harvard returns everybody from the last campaign, while the Tigers lost two of their top four players off of a team that was already among the shallowest benches in Division I basketball. While that simplistic response is, in and of itself, correct, it hardly quantifies the impact of retaining and losing players. It is that task which we will undertake in this analysis.

The Worst All-Ivy First Teamer (UPDATED)

In a proper ordering of the thoughts conveyed in this piece, it is important to stress that being the worst All-Ivy First Team member is akin to being the dumbest member of Mensa.

Any criticisms of either need to be placed within the context that the achievement in question is one of extremely high quality, and doubting whether a candidate cleared the necessary bar is hardly analogous to taking the negative side of a binary good-bad argument.

Noruwa Agho is a 6'3 shooting guard who just completed his junior season at Columbia. He led the Ivies in points per game, which was enough to get many, but not all, league coaches to vote him to the Ivy League's First Team.

In so doing, however, Agho became one of the worst First Teamers of the past 15 years, joining a group that includes Yale's Emerson Whitley, Cornell's Ka'Ron Barnes, Dartmouth's Shaun Gee and Harvard's Dan Clemente (twice).

While the casual Ivy observer will recognize some of those names, it's a lot to expect that all but the most fervent supporters will remember each of their individual league campaigns, and for that reason, we'll focus on Agho, who was by almost every aggregate metric the worst All-Ivy First Team member of at least the past five years.

Top Freshman Campaigns Last 15 Years

They get imaginary minutes before ever stepping on the court. They often represent the hope of a fanbase looking to rise from the league's depths. They are the great unknown from whom so much is expected.

And yet, they're just freshmen.

With the explosion of twitter and recruiting sites, college basketball fans have been brought closer to the window, looking in on one of the most intense battles waged in sports as coaches jockey for the nation's top talent. Even in the Ivy League, which more often than not gets second choice among a pool that's artificially small to begin with, fans watch intently as their school locks down high schoolers from across the country.