PROVIDENCE – It was your proverbial David versus Goliath matchup Saturday night inside the Pizzitola Center with Brown playing the role as David and Cornell starring as the Ivy League behemoth Goliath.
There would be no storybook ending for Brown. This time around, Goliath won the battle.
Cornell (18-8, 8-2 Ivy League) regained its stranglehold over the Ivy League with an 85-45 rout of last-place Brown (7-17, 1-9 Ivy League), delivering the Bears their worst loss of the season.
Cornell dominated the game from start to finish.
"Our goal was to come out and win the game," Brown coach Jesse Agel said. "We wanted to compete but none of those things happened tonight. [Cornell] was not hitting on all cylinders. When we played Cornell the first time they were terrific but they gave us some opportunity tonight by missing some wide open shots and we did not hustle to get the rebounds. We did not want to compete against them tonight and that’s not a good sign."
The Big Red, who used a well-balanced scoring attack to record a first-half knockout, outrebounded Brown, 48-29. Cornell had 12 offensive rebounds which led to 15 second-chance points, and the Big Red outscored Brown in the paint, 40-24.
"There were no positives tonight other than we have film for our bench guys to watch," Agel said. "Any time we got out in the passing lanes we seemed to throw the ball right to them. We just couldn’t get it going tonight."
Cornell scored 20 points off of 18 Brown turnovers and knocked down 51.5 percent of their shots while limiting the Bears to 31.6 percent shooting.
The Big Red jumped out to a 17-point lead by halftime thanks in large part to the stellar play of Ryan Whittman (15 points, 4 assists), who is one of the top 3-point shooters in the country, the 2008 Ivy League Player of the Year Louis Dale (12 points), center Jeff Foote (16 points, 9 rebounds), who scored most of his points on dunks, Alex Tyler (10 points, 6 rebounds), and Brian Kreefer (10 points, 7 rebounds).
Brown could not regroup.
Brown’s go-to guy, Matt Mullery, had the tough task of facing a 7-footer in Foote. The 6-foot-8 Mullery held his own against the 245-pound Cornell senior in the first half, when he scored 10 of his 11 points, but he was shut down in the second half. Teammate Peter Sullivan scored a team-high 12 points.
Mullery kept the Bears in the game in the opening 10 minutes by scoring their first eight points against a somewhat surprised Big Red team that found the Bears playing the entire game in a man-to-man defense instead of their patented 2-3 zone.
Cornell overcame its initial shock and used an 11-2 run over a four minute span to take a 17-8 lead and break open the game.
Brown never recovered.
"It was a bad night for our team," Agel said.
After building a 44-27 lead by halftime, the Big Red opened up the second half with a 10-0 run to put the game out of reach.
Brown starting forward Scott Friske missed his second straight game with mononucleosis. The Bears hope to get him back next weekend in time for their games at Princeton and Penn on Friday and Saturday night respectively.
"I hope he’s back but there is no guarantee of that," Agel said. "We are extremely distressed for Scott because I know how much he loves the game and whenever playing time is taken away, you feel bad for whoever that is."
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