Anonymous
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Re: Predictions on the Season
01-06-06 08:00 PM - Post#13065
In response to pennhoops
As much as I like this year's team (and the way Dunph is approaching things) I think that when they play a big, quick team they have and will continue to struggle on the offensive end. A superior defensive team is great, but you still have to score. Without consistent 3 pt shooting I don't see how Penn competes with a Top 25 type team. If the shooting improves dramatically and the can maintain the intensity and focus on D, lots of things are possible.
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foehi
Masters Student
Posts: 531
Reg: 12-22-04
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Re: Predictions on the Season
01-06-06 08:42 PM - Post#13066
In response to
This is a good...very good by today's Ivy standards....team which has comported itself pretty well against a very tough schedule to date. But you are right. They cannot compete against top 25 scholarship programs. They simply are deficient in three important areas, size, quickness and shooting versus big time teams. On a given night they can compensate for two of these shortcomings by excelling in the thrird (though it's a bit difficult to excel in size if you don't have it). They can shoot lights out and compete, they can play quick agressive D for 40 minutes (they have the depth to do this) and compete but bad shooting nights accompanied by less than all out defensive effort (Colorado perhaps) will be fatal. Citadel was their best shooting night of the season but the shots cames easier than they would against a better team....
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bobmed
Sophomore
Posts: 129
Loc: Skillman, NJ
Reg: 09-03-02
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Re: Predictions on the Season
01-06-06 08:46 PM - Post#13067
In response to charcoal
Penn 14-0
Harvard 10-4
Columbia 9-5
Cornell 9-5
Yale 8-6
Dartmouth 3-11
Brown 2-12
Princeton 1-13
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bobmed
Sophomore
Posts: 129
Loc: Skillman, NJ
Reg: 09-03-02
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Re: Predictions on the Season
01-06-06 08:47 PM - Post#13068
In response to bobmed
Princeton beats Brown at Princeton only.
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bobmed
Sophomore
Posts: 129
Loc: Skillman, NJ
Reg: 09-03-02
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Re: Predictions on the Season
01-06-06 08:49 PM - Post#13069
In response to nix23
Not going to happen
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Streamers
Professor
Posts: 8269
Loc: NW Philadelphia
Reg: 11-21-04
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Rest of the regular season:
01-06-06 10:08 PM - Post#13070
In response to palestra38
3-1 against the rest of the outside schedule (lose a close one at the FT line to SJU or LaSalle)
Ivies:
Penn 13-1 (lose to either Columbia or Harvard on the road)
Harvard 10-4
Columbia 7-7
Cornell 7-7
Yale 6-8
Brown 5-9
Princeton4-10
Dartmouth4-10
(hard to believe that PU is even worse than last year)
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The Lion King
Senior
Posts: 394
Reg: 11-21-04
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Re: Predictions on the Season
03-08-06 01:28 PM - Post#13071
In response to The Lion King
Well, I was right about Penn. This is the first time in history that I have ever made a correct sports prediction. (Don't look too closely at the other teams.)
I guess it was inaccurate to call this a below-par year for the Quakers, but barring an NCAA upset, I would not call it above-par either. As for the league as a whole, I know Jake has stats showing that this was the league's best year since 1979, or some such thing, and figures don't lie and all that, but consider:
--The league has only one good team this year, not two or three as usual.
--In fact, only one team besides the champion finished above .500 overall, and that by a single game.
--The league champion will need help from a bunch of schools with names that sound like irrigation districts to avoid a 15 seed.
--The second-place team lost to Carnegie-Mellon.
--The champion's signature win came against Hawaii, unless it was Drexel.
--The top three finishers all lost to Columbia.
--Did I mention that the second-place team lost to Carnegie-Mellon?
I don't know. If this was a good year for the Ivy League, I'd hate to see a bad one.
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The Lion King
Senior
Posts: 394
Reg: 11-21-04
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further explanation
03-08-06 02:47 PM - Post#13072
In response to The Lion King
In case you didn't catch my drift, the comment about "best year since 1979" was an exaggeration. I'm sorry if I seemed to misstate Jake's views; that was not my intent.
The comments from our Administrator that I was referring to can be found here:
http://ivy.basketball-u.com/index.php?p=126
And without going into detail, I'll say briefly that Jake's Myth #1 ("the Ivy League is at some sort of low ebb") is stated imprecisely enough that you can correctly call it false (if "low ebb" means "absolutely positively the worst ever") or true (if "some sort of" means a temporary recession, like an ebb tide). According to our standings page, the league's current overall RPI is 25, down from 24 when Jake wrote the item and a couple of notches below the historical average he cites.
The same goes for Myth #2 ("The Ivy League is caught in an overall downward trend"). As with the dead-horse debates about whether Penn or Princeton is historically better, this depends on when you start the comparison. If you begin in 2001-02, or in 2004-05, it sure looks like a downward trend to me, though not strictly monotonic. If you start in 1998-99, it's just fluctuation.
As for Myth #3 ("this will be Fran Dunphy's weakest championship squad"), Jake's explanation goes deeper into the differences between Old RPI and New RPI than I am prepared to follow. Penn's current RPI on our standings page is 100, which, if I understand properly, would work out to somewhere around 80 in the Old RPI that is the basis for the historical statistics Jake cites. If you look at the previous years' ratings, the 1995-96 team looks clearly worse, but this year's squad seems to be a strong contender for second-worst.
Of course, Jake made his analysis based on the information he had available--historical RPI ratings, with all their well-known flaws. That's a decent rough-and-ready tool for tracking Penn's performance from year to year, but I'm not convinced that it works as well for evaluating the league's performance as a whole. To me, counting how many other bargain-basement conferences had even worse years (perhaps by razor-thin margins) is less important than seeing how the Ivy League stacked up against other conferences with aspirations of being "mid-major." For this sort of analysis, the *size* of the gap between the Ivy League and conferences in, let's say, the 15-20 range is more important than the league's overall ranking. The fact that that this year's bottom feeders are merely bad instead of dreadful is also less of a consideration. So it all depends on how you define your terms.
Look, this whole dispute turns on people summarizing other people's views. If I seemed to be saying that Jake actually called this an above-average year for the league, I apologize--he didn't say that. But Jake's analysis only makes sense if you assume the existence of a widespread opinion that this is Dunphy's ABSOLUTE WORST championship team and that the Ivy League is having its ABSOLUTE WORST year ever. For the record, here is what SportsProf said in the article Jake cites (which I was finally able to read through Google cache; the link doesn't work for me, for some reason):
"1. The Ivies are at a low tide, their lowest in years, perhaps ever."
"2. This team is perhaps the worst of Fran Dunphy's title teams."
Note the use of "perhaps." (And by the way, the professor went on to say:
"7. I would surmise that Penn will be a #14 seed in the NCAA Tournament."
"8. Ibby Jaaber of Penn clearly is the Ivies' Player of the Year.")
So as far as I'm concerned, there is enough wiggle room in all these statements for everyone to be correct--Jake, me, SportsProf, and probably the rest of our posters too. This is indeed a below-average year for the league--not the worst ever, but more than slightly below par. And going into the tournament, this Penn team does look like one of Dunphy's weakest; whether it's the absolute worst or second-worst or third-worst or whatever depends on how you define those terms. None of these statements are meant to be numerically precise, so I don't think they can be disproved with statistics, and I have already explained my reasoning in an impressionistic way. So I'm content to leave it at that.
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