Cornell Basketball in the News

Below are a bunch of references to Cornell Basketball during the course of the weekend.

From the Idaho Statesman:

BIG RED BUILDING BIG MO

Cornell (21-10) expects to return all five players who started in Friday's game against Missouri. Center Jeff Foote is listed as a senior, but he has a year of NCAA eligibility remaining and is expected to be granted another season by the Ivy League. The Big Red have won two straight Ivy League titles. They played much better in the loss to Missouri than a year earlier in a blowout loss to Stanford. "There was a much better sense of poise and confidence about us," coach Steve Donahue said. "I have great aspirations for this team. É We're going to challenge ourselves in the preseason and try to get to this stage again. I'm confident we'll continue to grow as a program and a team and show better next year."

From the Missourian:

"It's hard to get tired in an NCAA Tournament game. These timeouts are three minutes long," Cornell coach Steve Donahue said after losing to Missouri on Friday. "I didn't sense fatigue at all."

From the Omaha World Herald:

You know Steve Donahue is a smart man. He'd have to be, coaching the relative braniacs of the Cornell basketball team.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Donahue, after Missouri had taken apart his team Friday, moved well beyond the obvious.

From the Idaho Statesmen:

Cornell couldn't handle Missouri's athleticism in the post - and that was the difference as the third-seeded Tigers pulled away from the 14th-seeded Big Red in the second half of a West Regional first-round game Friday at Taco Bell Arena.

Missouri senior forwards Leo Lyons and DeMarre Carroll combined for 36 points, 17 rebounds, seven assists, one blocked shot, two steals and no turnovers. They were 13-of-23 from the field and 9-of-9 at the free-throw line.

They were particularly effective in the second half, blowing open a close game for a 78-59 victory.

"I just think those two kids are so much better than anyone else in college basketball," Cornell coach Steve Donahue said. "They're older, tougher, more veteran. They buy into what coach (Mike) Anderson is doing. All those other guys are good basketball players. I just think those two are really special."

From the Lebanon Daily News:

ITCHING IVY:@ Cornell's 78-59 loss to Missouri on Friday extended the Ivy League's first-round losing streak to 11 years. The last Ivy team to win a game was Princeton, which beat UNLV 69-57 in 1998. This was Cornell's second straight year in the tournament; the other losses in the streak belonged to Penn (7) and Princeton (2).

Two years before the current streak started Princeton beat UCLA 43-41, the last time a defending champion lost in the first round.

From the Riverfront Times:

The Tigers move on, Cornell goes home. And in the end, it looked just like pretty much every other Missouri victory.

Watching the Tigers all year, there's a remarkably predictable pattern to every game that the Tigers win. At halftime, the game seems almost evenly matched, the score seemingly always within about 5-7 points either way. Then, in the second half, the Tigers keep running, keep putting up baskets, and their opponents just lose their legs. Their shots start falling short, and Mizzou ends up winning the game by double digits.

At halftime, Mizzou was up by four points on Cornell, a team that clearly should have been overmatched, and I'll bet that there were plenty of Mizzou fans feeling a wee bit nervous at such a narrow lead. We've seen this story before, after all; a Tiger team with plenty of talent that somehow still falls a little short when the chips are down.

And then came the second half. Cornell actually managed to shoot better in the second half than they did in the first (to be fair, both teams were extremely cold in the first half, shooting-wise), but the Tigers just kept running, kept pressing, kept scoring. Cornell eventually just couldn't keep up.

In the first half, the Tigers outscored Cornell by four points, 29-25. In the second half, Cornell scored 34. That should have been enough to stay right in it.

Unfortunately, Mizzou scored 49, and the game ended up the same as all of Mizzou's other wins.

Missouri 78, Cornell 59.
DeMarre Carroll scored 13 points, 11 of them in the second half. Carroll may be the face of this Tiger team; he's just an adequately skilled offensive player, but one of the toughest defenders in all of college basketball, and a truly tireless player, willing to run the floor all night long to get the W. He wears you down, beating you with energy and tenacity and ferocity, all the hallmarks of Mike Anderson's Tiger team. Carroll may never be the best player on the floor when the Tigers play; he's just the player most likely to beat you.

And it's going to be the same way every time.

From the Daily Atlas Review (Monmouth, IL):

[Mark] Vershaw has already seen his big upset pick go down. “I spent a year as an assistant at Cornell,” he said. “So as far as a big upset, I picked Cornell to win over Missouri in the first round.”

From the New York Times Quad Blog:

The Quad will be providing commentary and updates throughout the second day of the N.C.A.A. tournament from reporters in each region. In addition to Connor Ennis and Andrew Das in the Times office, Mike Ogle is blogging from various points in New York, and Stephen Danley, who played in the tournament for Penn, is contributing from a pub in England, where he is a Marshall Scholar.

Update | 5:33 p.m. Missouri’s up-tempo style proved to be too much for Cornell. The Tigers beat the Big Red, 78-59, and will play Marquette on Sunday.

Update | 4:46 p.m. Missouri has separated itself from Cornell, opening up a 17-point lead, but there are other possible upsets brewing. First, 11th-seeded Dayton is leading No. 6 West Virginia by 4, while No. 1 Pitt is being given a scare by 16th-seed East Tennessee State, which trails by 2 points with less than 10 minutes left. Could we be watching the biggest upset in tournament history?

Update | 3:48 p.m. Cornell is hanging tough with Missouri in the first half. That’s no surprise to Steve, our resident Ivy Leaguer, who has some familiarity with the Big Red:

As an Ivy League guy, I’m cheering for Cornell to pull off the upset of the first round against Missouri. Wasn’t thrilled about this matchup for them; I think the Tigers style of pressure can cause a lot of problems for a less athletic team. But Cornell has a shotmaker in Ryan Whitman, and Louis Dale is a good enough point guard to control the tempo. I could tell both of those guys were special when I played them when they were freshmen. And I don’t think you can underestimate the experience of the Big Red getting blown out last year against Stanford. All the Cornell guys have been here before, and they’ve had a whole year to think about getting back. If this stays close into the second half, don’t be surprised to see Missouri start to tighten up. That’ll be Cornell’s opportunity to hit some shots and take control of this game.

Update | 2:40 p.m. O.K., let’s recap after a furious few minutes. Kansas held off a game North Dakota State, 84-74, and advances to face the winner of the game between West Virginia and Dayton. Oklahoma State moves on to face either Pittsburgh or East Tennessee State after beating Tennessee, 77-75. And Marquette’s 58-57 win over Utah State puts them in the second round against either Missouri or Cornell.

From the Columbia Daily Trribune:

Big Red’s only hope, Cornell’s Dale will test Tigers.

He’s been at the center of the Cornell basketball team’s rise to the top of the Ivy League the past two seasons.

Twice, he’s garnered first-team All-Ivy League honors while leading the Big Red to back-to-back titles, a feat accomplished previously by only Princeton and Pennsylvania. In 2008, he was named the Ivy League player of the year.

But Louis Dale might never have been more important to Cornell than he will be today, when the 14th-seeded Big Red (21-9) tip off against third-seeded Missouri (28-6) and its high-pressure defense in the first round of the NCAA Tournament’s West Regional in Boise, Idaho.

“He’s going to have his hands full,” Cornell Coach Steve Donahue said of his 5-foot-11 junior point guard. “He’s going to have to play a terrific game for us to stay in this game for 40 minutes.”

The player Donahue has entrusted with so much responsibility over the past three years — and will again today — was one who fell into his lap. Dale, unsolicited, sent the Big Red coach a highlight tape midway through his all-state senior year at the Altamont School in Birmingham, Ala.

Dale was short on college suitors despite averaging 16 points, eight assists and seven rebounds as a junior. He admits to feeling overlooked while being regarded as a two-star recruit.

One option he was considering was trying to walk-on at Alabama-Birmingham, where Missouri Coach Mike Anderson was then in charge.

Dale’s grandfather, Louis Dale, had been on the school’s faculty since 1973. He began teaching mathematics but had risen to be UAB’s vice president for equity and diversity, a promotion he accepted in 2003. So Dale had grown up around the school.

In high school, he dropped by and played pickup games with Blazers players several times and occasionally watched UAB practices. He always was in the stands when UAB played Memphis.

Anderson showed an interest in Dale, though he was recruiting other guards ahead of him in line for a scholarship.

“He’s a very sharp kid, a real good character kid, a tremendous player,” Anderson said. “He’s a scorer, an athletic kid, but I guess Cornell was a better fit for him at that point in time. We didn’t really offer him, but at the same time, I did recruit him.”

Dale, who’s only other offers were from Columbia and East Carolina, only sent Cornell the tape, at his mother’s urging, after the school mailed him an application to join the school’s regular student population. Donahue was impressed and within weeks was in Birmingham recruiting him.

The coach got a commitment from Dale in April of his senior year, and he joined a recruiting class that also included Big Red leading scorer Ryan Wittman, the son of former Minnesota Timberwolves Coach Randy Wittman.

“I think when Ryan Wittman and Louis Dale came into our program, that was, obviously, a huge change in the level that we’re able to play,” Donahue said. “Louis brings us something that we just couldn’t have, and when he wasn’t in the game, we had to really alter the way we play. We like to play fast. We like to do some things in transition.

“Louis just enables you to do that. He does very good things with the ball. He’s a great decision-maker. He shoots the ball as well as anybody in the country, really, at the lead guard spot. You can’t leave him open.”

Dale averaged 13.3 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.7 assists as a freshman. He contributed 13.8 points and an Ivy League-leading 5.0 assists last season as the Big Red rolled through the conference season with a 14-0 record.

His junior season got off to a rough start as Dale missed the first eight games — including losses to St. John’s, Siena, Indiana and Syracuse — with a hamstring injury. It took him a while to get back into game shape, but he returned to form by the start of the Ivy League season, averaging 13.5 points and 3.6 assists to help Cornell go 11-3 in conference and lock up its second straight NCAA Tournament bid.

“Having been in a tournament one time and kind of knowing what to expect as far as the game and the atmosphere, I think that will help us and be to our advantage,” Dale said. “I think if we can play well, like we’re capable of, we definitely have a chance to win.”