Princeton beat Harvard 63-62 on a buzzer beater. That’s me screaming, “No!”
It was a great game with a very disappointing ending. Thanks to Constance Martin (@ConMartin on twitter) for the tickets!
Update: Also, before the game, the Ivy League presented both schools with the League Trophy for sharing the Ivy title.
My condolences….
I wouldn’t be surprised if the average income of a Harvard grad exceeds the average income of a major leaguer.
Slideshow Bob » Maybe over a full lifetime, a Harvard grad makes more. At my last reunion, my average classmate was earning in the six figures.
coach amaker at Harvard hoops has been cited twice in the last three years for recruiting violations, and although an ivy investigation has “cleared” him of the charged from two years ago, there is some lingering doubt as to whether Harvard is running a clean program.
while it’s nice that harvard wants to have a good basketball team, it seems to me that having squandered 22 billion dollars of a 50 billion endowment on bad investments in the 2008 investment debacle, and having made a lot of cuts all over the university affecting a lot of menial employees, junior faculty, and even cutting breakfasts to freshmen, that spending money on a basketball program that in 100 years has never won a thing, seems a total and ludicrous waste of money for a university that will never be better known for hoops, and is already well known for everything else.
i understand and sympathize that president faust came from penn, and that penn is the home of the Palestra and college hoops, and that she personally might want to see good college hoops at harvard, but this little vanity program can be expensive–Villanova spends about $6 million a year on basketball, and a good Ivy program and coach can’t be much cheaper. Princeton and Penn spend a pile on their programs.
frankly, this is a colossal waste of money.
i know James Brown, proud harvard hoops alum and sports commentator will differ on this, but harvard basketball is and always will be an oxymoron. boston isn’t even a basketball town–it’s a boston celtics town, and even at that, Bill Russell has written books and many interviews on the race problems he experienced while playing, living and coaching in Boston.
boston has gone from being the vanguard of the abolitionist movement in the 1800s to being one of the most viciously racist cities in america, despite all their liberal sentiments, primarily due to many socio-ethnic factors which have been well-documented. J Anthony Lukas and many others wrote about the debacle of school busing in Boston, and the boston public schools remain highly segregated. Patrick Ewing went to Cambridge Rindge & Latin HS, but there was never a chance he was going to go to Harvard–and yet Penn recruits public HS kids from Philly all the time.
Harvard will never have a real hoops program until it starts recruiting local kids from its own backyard and gets involved in the local public schools and grows its own kids, like they have with the big five in philly for years with the local high schools. the secret of college hoops in philly is no secret–the local coaches have deep recruiting ties to the local high school coaches.
if harvard really wants a bigtime sports program, they should just unhook themselves from the Ivy League and go the way of Stanford and Duke, and have a full-on Division I program all across the board, and just have scholarships for athletes.
They can certainly afford it, if that’s the way they want to go.
The dirty secret about Harvard is that most of the money goes to a few really highly paid faculty that they recruit as “free agents” from other colleges. These professors make millions of dollars a year while most of the other faculty and grad students barely make anything at all.
Former President Summers got in some heat for getting rid of one such professor–he will go unnamed, but he’s well known–who was making millions but producing no cognizable academic work of any kind.
for the same money he was replaced by several new tenured PhDs and an entire new building.
if it was me, i’d probably get rid of many of the expensive faculty and focus on hiring newer PhDs. The star system has outlived its usefulness in the age of the internet. no one even goes to class or listens to the professors anymore or even knows their names.
all that matters to the kids now is getting their jobs and grad school admissions.
in other words, gaming the system.
anyhow, penn took harvard to two overtimes. i watched harvard play at the palestra, and to be honest, even though the harvard team has a lot of talent, they don’t play with any heart and they don’t play as a team. they have long stretches where they don’t seem to know what they are doing, and Amaker doesn’t seem like a very good floor or game coach. the Penn kids were totally outmanned and outgunned, but they played as a team and outhustled and outran the harvard kids for an entire half and an entire overtime before getting tired in the second overtime and finally losing.
Penn took harvard to overtime last year also. Harvard was loaded last year too but lost to a better coached Cornell team.
Again, you can put the talent together, but unless the team plays with heart and as a team, they can’t win.
That’s why Princeton is going to the NCAAs–they play as a team, and Princeton has a long tradition of sportsmanship and teamwork, qualities that Harvard has long lacked. The average Harvard grad may be brilliant, but often is eager to compete and outshine his classmate as opposed to working with his classmate in a friendly manner.
Penn & Princeton & Cornell men are more team-oriented and work together. Basketball is a team sport.
Team players succeed in sports, not individualists.
–art kyriazis