Penn Coach Jerome Allen. Photo Credit: Penn Athletics
With the remnants of the flu muffling his voice and a win over Dartmouth under his belt, Penn’s Tyler Bernardini put things in perspective on Friday night.
“This is how it was supposed to be,” he said. “When I came here they were coming off an Ivy League title (in 2006-07), so this is how I thought my four years were going to go here. Unfortunately, they haven’t. (Winning) these next two games would make up for some lost time.”
Those next two games are Saturday night’s affair against Harvard and showdown with rival Princeton on Tuesday.
Don’t look now, but Penn (3-0 Ivy League, 9-8) might be relevant again.
For a handful of years planets fell out of orbit and the top of the Ivy League standings were unrecognizable. No Penn? No Princeton? The league’s flagship programs slipped out of sight and things didn’t look right.
Now, even though it’s still early February, order appears to have been restored to the Ancient Eight. Penn sits at 3-0 in conference play for the first time since the 2007. Princeton, having toppled Harvard on Friday night, is tied with it’s rival atop the league standings at 3-0 and is 15-4 overall. Cornell, the three-time defending league champion, has slipped back to 0-5 in the conference and 4-15 overall.
While the other Ivy institutions might not like to admit it, the league is better off with Penn and Princeton returning to prominence.
Especially Penn.
Though the argument has raged for years of, “Who has the better basketball tradition, Penn or Princeton?” (25 Ivy titles apiece), the Quakers have three abstract variables that Princeton can’t match — the fabled Palestra, the history of the Big 5 and the visibility of playing in the sixth largest market in America.
For the good of everyone involved, Penn needs to be good. And while it’s been a long climb through the slop, it seems the Quakers are almost back.
Second-year head coach Jerome Allen, however, will be the last to say it.
“What have we done?” he asked — not rhetorically. “It’s like Janet Jackson, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Although we connect with our tradition and our history and we applaud and celebrate things that other teams have done here, it’s our responsibility to write our own story. They’re in the driver’s seat. We control our own destiny.”
To be clear, Penn still bears little resemblance to the teams Allen played on in the early 1990’s. The two-time Ivy League player of the year played for current Temple coach Fran Dunphy and starred alongside Matt Maloney on teams that competed nationally. Back then, the league schedule was simply a prelude to the NCAA tournament. Those Quakers packed the Palestra from corner to corner. Students filled a quarter of the 8,722 seats and roared.
That’s still a long time ago.
The old barn was pretty bare versus Dartmouth on Friday night. For those not familiar with Philadelphia lexicon, soldout games at the Palestra are referred to as “corner packers.” The Dartmouth game featured empty seats at halfcourt while every row of benches sat empty in the corners.
But while there’s a way to go toward Penn being Penn again, the winds of change are churning through the Quakers’ West Philadelphia campus.
“We’ve won four in a row and we’re already starting to see some buzz around campus,” said Berdardini, the Ivy League’s 2008 rookie of the year. “We want to keep that going. We don’t want that to die down. We don’t want people wearing trash bags in the stands again.”
That’s how bad things were at Penn in the very recent past. This is the same program that won 11 Ivy League titles since 1992-93, more championships than any other men’s basketball team in any other NCAA Division I conference in the country.
It’s Allen’s mission to restore some swagger to the program. He was named interim head coach last season after Glen Miller was fired following an 0-8 start. In the two-plus seasons leading up to Allen replacing Miller, the Quakers were 23-44. Allen took the wheel of a funeral procession and salvaged a 6-14 finish (5-9 in the Ivy, 6-22 overall).
This season’s team is guided by junior point guard Zack Rosen, a fighter pilot who slings assists (4.4 apg), fires a feathery jumper (17.7 ppg), and who is widely considered as the favorite for Ivy player of the year.
With Rosen directing, the Quakers don’t light up the scoreboard, but run a smart, crisp offense and have the 12th highest assist percentage in the country (63.1 percent). They’re slow (just one game this season with double-digit fast break points) and don’t rebound overly well, but the attack is balanced and each player is locked into playing his role. The non-conference slate ended with a 6-8 record that featured three losses to teams with RPI’s under 25, along with head-scratching losses to Manhattan and Marist.
“If we we’re on a grading scale, I’d probably give us a ‘C’,” said Allen, a 38 year old with no prior head-coaching experience whose suits look like they were plucked from the pages of Esquire. “All and all, I know we’re moving in a forward direction and I don’t want to be playing our best basketball right now. I want to continue to get better each and every game.”
So on Saturday night, Harvard will come limping into the Palestra on the heels of Friday’s loss at Princeton. A Penn victory would be one more step toward the Quakers regaining stewardship of the Ivy. Assuming the Tigers handle Dartmouth on Saturday, the stage will beautifully be set for Tuesday’s 223rd meeting between Penn and Princeton (Penn holds a 122-100 advantage). This addition will take place at Jadwin Gym on Princeton’s lush Jersey campus.
It all sounds very familiar.
“This is it,” Rosen said. “Finally. In the next two games, we can control where our season goes. We know we have it in our hands. It’s not up to anybody else and we’re not concerned with anyone else. We’re going to take care of what we’re going to take care of and try to win (on Saturday).”
“This is fun, too,” added Bernardini.
And that sounds like the Penn of old.
- Brendan F. Quinn
http://www.collegechalktalk.com
