Jesse Spector: Yale climbing the Ivy

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- On Friday night, Ime Archibong was greeted with a round of applause when he walked into Yorkside Pizza, a block from Yale's Payne-Whitney Gym.

About an hour earlier, Archibong and the Elis had done the once-unthinkable -- they toppled the Penn men's basketball team and moved to 6-1 in the Ivy League.

A victory over Princeton on Saturday put Yale atop the Ivy standings.

After going 4-22 with a 2-12 Ivy record in 1998-99, the Elis brought in a new coach, James Jones, who immediately infused new life to the program. Not much progress was evident when the Quakers dealt Yale a 61-36 defeat on their trip to New Haven, Conn., in 2000.

Things have changed in the Elm City. Yale started 6-3 in the Ivy League last year before falling to 7-7. Now, with no seniors, all of Yale's players have known only the tutelage of Jones, and the 15-7 Elis have the inside track for their first NCAA Tournament bid since 1962.

"We've been fortunate enough to do a pretty good job recruiting," Jones said. "You take over a program, and you want your system to be in place, and guys like Ime and Chris Leanza and T.J. McHugh, those guys have paid their dues and they've gotten better. So has the team."

Getting better is an understatement. When Jones took over, the idea of Yale being an Ivy League contender, let alone the league's leader, was laughable.

Laughable, that is, to everyone except Jones, who continues to motivate his team by stressing the lack of external respect for the Elis. On Friday night, Jones bristled at any suggestion that Yale's win over Penn was a fluke.

He was proven right not only by the Elis' victory over Princeton, but by the facts of Friday night's game. Yale topped the Quakers despite getting just eight and six points, respectively, from leading scorers Edwin Draughan and Paul Vitelli. Both average 11.7 points per game.

The Elis beat Penn on the strength of their flexibility and of their planning.

Down by one point at halftime, Jones met with his assistants in the hallway outside the Yale locker room. He stood with his jacket slung over his left shoulder and his right foot up against the wall.

Jones listened, and the assistants presented their thoughts. The Yale staff made its adjustments, and seized the lead within the first minute of play. After trading a couple of baskets with the Quakers, Yale went on a 9-0 run.

The Elis then went to work with their plans. Over a span of eight minutes, McHugh drew four fouls on Penn forward Ugonna Onyekwe and scored 11 of his 15 points against Onyekwe's softened defense before fouling out himself with 3:33 to go. After McHugh left, Josh Hill got Onyekwe to foul out and scored five points of his own in the last two minutes.

The Elis also used Penn's foul trouble as an advantage in the backcourt. Quakers guard Andrew Toole picked up his third foul at the end of the first half and became an easy mark for Yale's Alex Gamboa, who hit key shots and scored 14 of his 16 points in the second half.

Overall, Yale shot 69.6 percent from the field in the second half to turn a one-point deficit into a five-point win.

"It's phenomenal, where [Jones] has taken the team," Ime Archibong said. "Our first year, there was a couple of guys to get things done, now you have 1 through 10, 1 through 11, 1 through 12."

The Elis showed their depth with contributions from players like Hill, who averages just 13 minutes per game, but was forced into some high-pressure action by McHugh's foul trouble.

For its part, Penn was unable to adjust to Yale's strategies. For most of the season, the Quakers have relied on a strategy of hitting enough three pointers to supplement the frontcourt scoring efforts of Onyekwe and Koko Archibong.

On Friday night, the Red and Blue went 7-for-23 from downtown and could not launch a game-tying triple in the final seconds.

Even on Saturday night, when Penn had a significant size advantage over Brown's frontcourt, the Quakers built their lead on the power of 6 for 9 three-point shooting in the first half.

Dunphy's Quakers have never been quick to make adjustments --ÿPenn's 50-49 loss to Princeton in 1999, its NCAA Tournament game against Florida in the same year and this season's contest with Illinois were all lost because Penn stopped hitting threes in the second half and made too few adjustments to protect leads.

It will take the kind of flexibility that Yale showed on Friday night for the Quakers to get back into the Ivy League race.

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