Cornell Basketball in the News

A couple of references to Cornell Basketball in the news today...

A Brown Daily Herald writer advocates respect for the NIT. The author notes:

This year, for example, Cornell got a seed in the NCAA tournament because they were the Ivy League champions. According to the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), a statistical tool used by the NCAA to seed teams in the tournament, Cornell was only the 115th best college basketball team this year. San Diego State, Creighton, UAB, St. Mary's (Calif.), Illinois State, and Niagara all finished the season with top 50 RPIs and trips to the NIT.

Also, in a late publication, the Boise State student newspaper, The Arbiter, published a late recap of Cornell's first round exit from the NCAA Tournament. The Arbiter writes:

If you watched the first half of play, you saw a low scoring Missouri squad that was barely hanging onto a four point lead against Cornell as they went into the locker room.

Boy the difference a half makes. The Missouri Tigers used their halftime speech to fire them up and propel them to a 78-59 victory over the Big Red.

"I thought the second half was typical of our basketball team all year long," Missouri head coach Mike Anderson said. What was typical was the 57 percent field goal shooting, and the 37.5 percent from beyond the arch. On the night they finished a sound 47.5 percent from the field.

The Tigers used a stifling defensive effort all afternoon to cool of the Big Red. A normally hot handed Cornell team was held to just 35.9 percent shooting on the night. To say the least Anderson was very pleased with his teams effort on the defensive end.

The only high point for Cornell was that of All-Ivy League all star Ryan Wittman who finished the game with a team high 18 points. However, he and the rest of The Big Red struggled from beyond the arch, an area were they normally excel at. On the day they only had six three pointers, which included a 4-11 performance from Wittman.

For Missouri they were led by the trio of DeMarre Carroll, Leo Lyons and J.T. Tiller, who finished with 13, 23 and 11 points respectively on the day.