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.