The State of Ivy Basketball - Basketball U.

1. The AI: The difference between the schools is quite minimal and Penn does not get the most advantage. If the AI were a factor, why does Princeton consistently beat Harvard? Why is Harvard so competitive in football? One would think that an AI disdvantage would be a much bigger problem in football where you need so many players.

2. Travel partners: Maybe we could seed the travel partners each year - that Penn/Dartmouth trip would really be a blast as would Cornell/Harvard. The travel partners issue is brought up each year because it's theoretically harder for the bottom six to always play the Ps back-to-back. Even if that's true, it doesn't change the fact that it wouldn't matter: Only once in the past decade, I believe has a non-P (Dartmouth) gone 10-0 against the non-Ps. They finished 10-4.

This year, for instance, if you take the Ps out of the League, the standings go like this: Cornell 7-3, Yale 7-3, Brown 5-5, Harvard 5-5, Dartmouth 4-6, Columbia 2-8. Without the Ps, the League has parity at a fairly low level. The travel partnering of the Ps is irrelevant because the bottom six can't sweep the other weekends. Only Harvard swept its travel partner this season and it meant nothing. As as has also been demonstrated in the past, when one of the Ps has been weaker, it's done virtually nothing to help the non-Ps success with the other P.

2A. Back-to-back weekend games: I have no idea how this gives an advantage to the Ps since the Ps traditionally play their starters the most minutes under the most pressure and should theoretically be hurt the most by playing two games in 26 hours. I could argue that if you gave the Ps a day off between games and played Friday and Sunday, they would almost never lose a road game.

3. No conference tournament. We've argued this for years and there is not one shred of evidence that this would do anything to make the weaker teams stronger as it has not made any of the weaker teams stronger in the Patriot, the MEAC or any of the other lower-tier D1 conferences. It would occasionally give a weak Ivy team a chance to catch lightning in a bottle and be a 16 seed in the NCAA tournament, but that's it. What's far more likely is that until the non-Ps got better and more competitive, it would just give the Ps a few more wins and a chance to have another game on a Thursday at noon on ESPN2.

Of the three major rankings: In the RPI, there are 218 spots separating Penn and No. 8 Dartmouth and 119 spots between Penn and No. 2 Cornell. In the Sagarins it's 225 top to bottom and 158 from No. 1 to No. 2. In the Pomeroys it's 201 and 147. I believe that over the past 10 seasons, Penn's WORST RPI ranking was higher than any non-P's AVERAGE RPI ranking. That's a League that would be improved by a tournament?

If you want the Ivy League to be more competitive in basketball you have two choices: Change the financial aid rules or kick Penn out.