Slope TV on NCAA Tournament Bid Scenarios

Sam Aleinikoff and SlopeTV outlines Cornell's potential scenarios to clinch an NCAA Tournament Bid:

Possible Scenarios for a Cornell NCAA Tournament Bid

The final weekend of Ivy League basketball is almost here and a league that seemed fairly straightforward just a few days ago isn’t anymore. With the Cornell loss at Harvard on Saturday, the Big Red (19-9) fell to 9-3 in Ivy League play, just one game ahead of Princeton (12-12, 7-4) in the loss column. Also still in contention for at least a share of the Ivy League title and an NCAA tournament birth are Yale (12-14, 7-5) and Dartmouth (9-17, 7-5).

In most conferences, the regular season crown is important merely for school pride and seeding in the conference tournament, but the Ivy League remains the only conference in the country that decides its representative in the tournament via the regular season champion. As Cornell Head Coach, Steve Donahue, has reiterated throughout the season, in the Ivy League the regular season is a round-robin tournament. After 14 games a-piece, the champion is crowned.

Well, maybe not this year. In the Ivy League, if two or more teams are tied at the end of a season, they compete in a single elimination playoff on a neutral site (as Cornell Women’s Basketball did last year to win the NCAA tournament birth over Harvard and Dartmouth). No tiebreakers are used. Overall record is disregarded. Head-to-head results also go down the drain.

Going into the final weekend of Ivy play here are all of the possible outcomes for the Big Red and the results that would need to occur for each one to happen:

Cornell Outright Conference Championship

1) Cornell W vs. Princeton
2) Cornell W vs. Penn, Cornell L vs. Princeton, Princeton L at Columbia and Princeton L at Penn
3) Cornell L vs. Penn, Cornell L vs. Princeton, Princeton L at Columbia, Princeton L at Penn, Yale L vs. Dartmouth or Harvard and Dartmouth L at Yale or Brown

Cornell Shared Conference Championship

1) Cornell W vs. Penn, Cornell L vs. Princeton, Princeton W at Columbia, Princeton W at Penn (Cornell Tie with Princeton)
2) Cornell L vs. Penn, Cornell L vs. Princeton, Princeton L at Columbia or Penn (Cornell tie with Princeton)
3) Cornell L vs. Penn, Cornell L vs. Princeton, Princeton L at Columbia or Penn, Yale W vs. Harvard and Dartmouth or Dartmouth W vs. Yale and Brown (Cornell tie with Princeton and Yale or Dartmouth)

Cornell Misses Out on the Championship All Together

1) Cornell L vs. Penn, Cornell L vs. Princeton, Princeton W at Columbia and Princeton W at Penn

The bottom line is that to some extent both Cornell and Princeton still control their own destinies in terms of the NCAA tournament. If Cornell can knock off Princeton on Saturday night, they’re in. If Princeton wins out, they can win the league outright with a Cornell loss vs. Penn on Friday night. Still they control their own destiny because even with a Cornell win vs. Penn on Friday night, they could go dancing by winning their final 4 games (including the possible one-game playoff vs. Cornell). Yale and Dartmouth both need some help to get a shot at the big dance.

Seemingly the most important game remaining on the Ivy League slate is Princeton at Cornell on Saturday night in Newman Arena where the Big Red are 11-0 this year and have run off 19 in a row overall, the third longest current streak in the country. (Cornell is technically 13-0 as the home team this year, but 2 of those wins came in the NIT Season Tip-off at St. John’s.) In the first contest between these two squads, Princeton came away with a shocking 61-41 upset victory infet Princeton, NJ.