My younger brother sent me a text message Friday afternoon that said, "Who sucks more? You guys or Penn?"
Like many, my brother was making his picks in ESPN's awesome Streak for the Cash game, which gave Friday's basketball game a bit of national attention since it was listed as an option.
Whether ESPN chose to include the game in its daily menu of pick 'em's because of the two teams' embarrassingly bad records (Penn was 2-14 and Dartmouth was 4-14 at the time), the recent spotlight on the Ivy League due to No. 25 Cornell University's recently minted ranking or the game's Vegas closing line of Dartmouth by one, we'll never know. We do know, though, that Dartmouth lost perhaps its only winnable game of the Ivy League season, and the 80 percent of streakers who chose the Big Green to help their shot at $100,000 were disappointed.
For what it's worth, I told my brother to stay away. When Cornell's not on the court, it seems, Ivy League basketball games can go either way.
It's this unpredictable nature of Ivy League games that led me to favor conference basketball tournaments, like the one that every other Division I basketball conference uses to determine its postseason automatic berth.
But now, in light of Cornell's wild success, I'm changing my tune.
The concept of an Ivy League tournament seems, at its face, really awesome. Imagine an Ivy League pilgrimage every year to a major city Boston, New York or Philadelphia for a three-day weekend of men's and women's basketball. The Ivy League could finally be part of the early-March conference tournament hoopla, with its associated rivalries, buzzer-beaters, nailbiters and upsets.
The tournament would allow the conference to definitively determine its best team and ambassador to the NCAA tournament instead of the coin-toss nonsense that sent the Cornell women's team to the Big Dance in 2008 and relegated a deserving Big Green squad to the women's NIT and allow heated rivals to meet for a third time to settle a split-season series.
The problem I'm now seeing with such a tournament is that it would really take the luster off of the Ivy League regular season, and potentially keep a strong, deserving team out of the tournament.
Take this year as an example. Cornell has been absolutely dominant. The Big Red nearly knocked off then-No. 1 Kansas in Allen Fieldhouse, and has so far embarrassed all of its Ivy League opponents, especially Dartmouth. Cornell looks like a lock to win the Ivy League and head to the tournament as the highest-seeded Ivy in a decade.
But what if a 14-0 Ivy League record wasn't enough to punch the Big Red's ticket to the first round? A conference tournament could mean Cornell would have to win as many as three more games before setting off on the road to Indianapolis. And in a conference tournament, anything can happen.
The tournaments work well for major conferences that can usually count on sending at least two teams to March Madness. It's not a problem if Purdue University, for example, doesn't win the Big Ten's postseason tournament because it's still virtually assured a spot to play for the national title. In the Ivy League, though, that's probably not the case.
If Cornell were to stumble in an Ivy League tournament, maybe with a fluke loss to Columbia or even Princeton, and lose the automatic berth, the selection committee probably wouldn't jump at the chance to use up an at-large bid on a second Ivy League school at the expense of a big-name program. Instead of sending a potential nine-seed (or higher) with a ton of upset potential, the Ivy League would be left with a high-teens seed waiting to get steamrolled, as usual.
Sure, fair is fair and if Cornell did get beat in this nonexistent tournament, maybe it wouldn't deserve to go to the NCAA tournament anyway. But like I said before, in the Ivy League anything can happen, and the conference would be foolish to create a situation where the best team in the league could see its tournament hopes dashed by a fluke upset at the hands of a team it has already faced twice that year.